1. Stop sending so many emails

Sometimes it’s much better to handle something in person or over the phone than to use email. You must learn to recognize such situations; otherwise, you may find yourself buried under replies to your emails. Email is generally excellent for communicating well-formulated messages that require, at most, a simple confirmation. It is much less suitable for extended group conversations where multiple participants share their thoughts with one another.

2. Start reading your emails regularly

We know that the last thing you want to do before or after work is read work-related emails, but this is how things should be if you want to become an efficient email organizer. Depending on how many emails you receive each day, it can take just a couple of days or even hours for your inbox to start overflowing with new, unread emails. By reading your emails regularly, you ensure that the situation never gets out of hand.

3. Start checking your emails throughout the day

There is no excuse not to have a smartphone these days. No matter what email service you use, there’s a way to get it working on all major mobile operating systems. Having your email on your phone allows you to easily read new email throughout the day, which can dramatically reduce the length of your scheduled email reading sessions, the importance of which we described in the previous chapter.

4. Start using an email client

Web-based email services are great because you can conveniently access them from anywhere, even when you’re away from your own personal computer. But even the best web-based user interface can’t rival the features and convenience of dedicated email clients like Outlook or Mailbird. The email clients are faster, can display emails from multiple email services in a single window, support keyboard shortcuts, come with powerful spell-checking capabilities, and are available for all operating systems and devices.

We’ve already mentioned Outlook and Mailbird, which are possibly the most popular email clients for Windows, but there’s also Airmail, an email client for iPhone and macOS from the Italian company Bloop SRL, Postbox, a desktop email client and font reader for Windows and macOS written and sold by Postbox, Inc., or Mozilla Thunderbird, a free and open source cross-platform email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation, just to name a few available options.

5. Stop subscribing to newsletters

Websites and businesses love email newsletters because they allow them to stay engaged and sell products with minimal effort. While some newsletters are clearly valuable, most, sooner or later, end up being ignored. You may think it’s no big deal to sign up for a newsletter – after all, you can always unsubscribe later – but experience tells us that things tend to get unmanageable much quicker than they initially seem. We recommend that you stop subscribing to all newsletters as a general rule and use other communication channels to receive information from websites and companies, such as social networks or RSS.

6. Start using multiple mailboxes

Why have one mailbox for everything when you can have several and use a different one for each of the things you do? You can start, for example, with a mailbox for work-related emails and a mailbox for personal emails. Some people like to go further and use a privacy-oriented email service like ProtonMail for potentially sensitive personal communications and a free and convenient email service like Gmail for web services and online shopping. Another benefit of this approach comes in the form of better security. Having some degree of separation between various activities minimizes the impact of an email breach and gives malicious hackers less information to work with.