3 Tools to Keep Your Email Inbox Clean and Your Life Organised.
As an entrepreneur, your email inbox can begin to take over your life. If you're not running the kind of business that allows you to stay at your desk (or even if you are) you can end up drowning in a sea of emails. I've found 3 tools that will keep your email inbox clean and help you stay organised.
Every so often, my email inbox becomes full of useless marketing updates that I've subscribed to. Eventually I end up cutting my losses and making a brand new email address. Every time I promise myself, NEVER AGAIN, that this address will just be for official correspondence. Low and behold I end up in the same situation. Unroll.me shows you exactly what you're subscribed to and allows you to unenroll there and then. It also allows you to organise the subscriptions that you want to keep into a daily digest so you get one email rather than a bunch. Best part? It's totally free.
I don't want to sound dramatic but this tool has changed my life. I used to be one of those people that had 8,752 emails in my inbox and I knew when there was 8,753 that it meant I had a new email. Inbox by Gmail lets you select when an email is 'done' and zooms it into your 'done' folder. By doing this you leave only the emails which require some kind of action to keep your day organised. It allows you to 'snooze' an email that will re-appear later at a time of your choosing. There is also the ability to set reminders for whatever you need. One of my favourite features of the tool is that it will provide you with auto-responses based on the email you've received. An email like "Does 3pm still work for you?" will auto-load "Yep, works for me!" and "Sorry I can't make it." options that you can fire off if you so choose. You can check out the video below to see how it works:
If you really just can't bring yourself to start cleaning out your inbox, The Email Game might be for you. After you enter your email address you have 30 seconds per email to archive, skip or reply to the email. If you decide to reply it gives you three minutes to write your response. You get points for completing emails and get points deducted if you go over time. This seems like the most millennial idea ever but it really works! Combine these three tools and you'll have that illusive Inbox Zero in no time.