050. The Most Simple Way To Declutter Your Email Inbox To Save Time!

📩 How many emails are in your inbox right now? Too many? Feeling overwhelmed? You’re not alone! Today, I’m sharing the easiest way to declutter your email inbox so you can save time, reduce stress, and never lose an important email again.

Here's what you'll learn in this episode:

• Why email clutter is a huge time-waster
• How one small email mistake cost my friend so much time
• A simple, low-tech method to declutter your inbox
• The only 4 things you need to do with your emails
• How to unsubscribe ruthlessly (and a great tool to do it fast)

Your 6-Step Plan to an Organized Inbox:

1️⃣ Schedule time to declutter your email.
2️⃣ Create a free email account for store sales, newsletters, and downloads.
3️⃣ Unsubscribe ruthlessly (use unroll.me for quick results).
4️⃣ Set up an Archive folder so your inbox stays clean.
5️⃣ Move ALL emails from your inbox to Archive (Yes, really. You won’t lose them!).
6️⃣ From now on, do only one of four things: Delete, Reply & Archive, Schedule & Archive, or Reference.

Need Help Decluttering Your Email?

I offer 1:1 virtual organizing sessions to help you take control of your email inbox! Send me a message, and let’s make it happen.

🎧 Listen now and take the first step toward an organized, stress-free inbox!

📌 Take the Quiz! Want to know your Organizing Personality? It takes less than 30 seconds! 👉 fireflybridge.com/quiz

Connect with me:

You can find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
Here's my website: https://fireflybridge.com

Call or text me: 305-563-2292

Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

How many emails are in your inbox right now? Go ahead, take a look. Got a number?

Now, how many are Unread emails? Mmhmm.

Now the big question: do those numbers freak you out a little bit? Like you’re thinking, “Did I miss something important in those unread emails?” 

Or “Was I supposed to remember to do something from one of those emails that I already read?”

Well, lucky for you, today I’m sharing The Most Simple Way to declutter your email inbox so you can save SO much time! And you can feel less anxiety knowing you didn’t miss anything from your email. So stick around.

Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!


Last week, I was at a friend’s house and she told me that her son, who turned 15 in February, was ready to get his driver’s permit. For those of you who don’t live in the US, getting a driver’s license works like this: At 15, you can receive a driver’s permit, that allows you to drive with an adult who is over 21, sitting in the passenger seat next to you. Then, when you turn 16, after presumably a full year of practice, you take a driving test and if you pass, you get your actual license, which allows you to drive alone.

Now, to get the permit when you’re 15, you take some online courses with assessments, and if you pass those, you have to make an appointment with the DMV to bring in your documentation in person and get that permit.

So, in February, my friend tried making an appointment to get her son’s permit. The first appointment she could find was in March. So she made the appointment, received the confirmation email, and thought OK all was good.

Now, around the 1st week of March, she suddenly remembered that oh! That DMV appointment was for March! But she couldn’t find the appointment in her calendar, which was weird, because she always puts those things in her calendar.

Well, no problem, she thought. I still have the confirmation email in my inbox.

So she started searching for the email. She types in DMV, driver, permit, anything thought might be in the title of the email - in the subject line - but nothing would come up!

She spent nearly an hour searching, until finally she found it. By the way, nowhere on that email did ‘DMV’ appear! It was under some other name, Florida something or other.

But anyway, she saw in the confirmation email that the appointment was for March 10th at 10am. Which she also thought was odd, because she thought she had made the appointment for after school. But, whatever, she and her son gathered all the documentation and showed up on March 10th at 10 am, or before 10 am, got in the very long line, and when they reached the front of the line - now let me describe the DMV offices here in Miami. You make a line OUTSIDE the building. They don’t even let you inside the building unless the person outside confirms that you have all the necessary documentation. And if you do, THEN they let you inside, to get into another line.

So she makes it to the front of the line outside, shows all her paperwork, but the person tells her that she’s not on the appointment list. She doesn’t have an appointment for that day.

But, no, she says, that’s a mistake, because she has the confirmation email!

So she searches her email inbox again on her phone to find the confirmation email, and finally finds it and shows it to the person. He’s now scrolling through the confirmation message because he can’t understand why she has a confirmation, but she doesn’t appear on their appointment list.

Mind you, this all takes place over the course of about 7 or 8 minutes and she feels she’s holding up the line, so anxiety is mounting, right?

Finally, the guy turns her phone to her and says, ‘Ma’am, this appointment was in 2022.”

My friend was mortified. She knows she made an appointment for March of this year. 

So anyway, they don’t let her in, of course, and she and her son have to come home and figure out when the actual appointment is for.

So another hour or more searching her email, and she finally finds the appointment confirmation for this year. The appointment was for March 6th. They missed it by 4 days.

Now she goes back onto the DMV website and looks for the next available appointment: it’s not until April.

Which means that her son will get his Permit in April this year, but can’t drive on his own until April of NEXT year when he’ll be able to get his driver’s License, which means that she has to drive him to school, or carpool, all year long, basically until nearly the end of the school year next year. Which is what she was trying to avoid.

Can you feel her frustration? I sure could. It’s this type of thing that we all really want to avoid in our emails. If she had just been able to find the correct email confirmation, she could have made it to the March 6th appointment!

So how do you get your email inbox decluttered simply? I mean, I could tell you: hey! Set up a bunch of rules, have emails from this type of sender or that type of sender bypass your inbox and go into another folder! Or a whole lot of other complicated steps and things, but here’s what I know happens and I’ve seen it many times:

You take hours to figure out how to set up rules for your email service, you set up a handful, you set up the email folders the  emails go into, and then, after a few days or a week, you realize you now have multiple email folders you have to keep track of, it’s really complicated, and you quit.

OK, maybe I’m not giving enough credit to the tech-loving ones out there. But if you’re listening to this podcast, my guess is you’re looking for an easier way to do this without giving you more places that you have to look everyday to keep on top of your emails!

So I have another solution for you. It’s the Lazy Organizer solution for Beautiful Living with your email.

I’m going to give you all the steps, and one of the steps is a little scary. But stick with me! You can do this! We’ll do it together, ok?

All right. Here we go.

So I looked up a statistic for how many emails the average person gets a day. And according to THE RADICATI GROUP, a which is a Technology Market Research firm, in the US, that number is 121. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot of emails per day, maybe, but how often do you clear out 121 emails each day, so your inbox is empty, and ready for another 121 tomorrow?

Not often, right? And so, what happens? Well, the number of emails that end up staying in your inbox just keeps building and building and building to get to that number you found at the start of this episode! Right?

So, why don’t we get through 121 emails a day? Well, it could be a bunch of reasons, like you’re working away from your electronics all day, so you don’t see your email until the evening, and by then you’re tired. Or, there’s a mix of types of emails that you get each day, right? You get work emails, emails from your sisters, spam emails, emails from an airline, Pottery Barn, or Macy’s.

And it’s just hard to be decisive! You get notice of a special sale, and you think, Oh! I need to look at this! So you keep it in your inbox for later. Only by the next day, you don’t have time to look at it again, so you say, I’ll look at it within the next few days. But another 121 emails have come in each day, and now that original email is buried.

Not only is THAT email buried, but you know what else is buried with it? The confirmation email from the DMV. Or the tax form you needed to print out when you got home 3 weeks ago, but you forgot. Or the school field trip form you were supposed to fill out. Mm.

So that’s why we are where we are.

And here’s what you can do about it. And like I said, I’m keeping this simple, ok?

Step 1: Schedule time to take care of this.
A lot of the time, it’s when you’re desperately searching for an email that you decide you need to declutter your inbox, and you start to do it right then and there. And before you know it, 2 hours have passed, and you haven’t gotten important work or errands done. So don’t try to clean out your inbox on just any day. Schedule time for it.

Schedule a block of 2 hours to start with. Hey, if you finish before 2 hours are up, well, then you’ve got some free time to have a piece of pie and a cup of tea. If you’re not done in those 2 hours, well you’ll schedule another 2 hours on another day, but in between, you’ll keep doing the next steps. Right?

Step 2: Get yourself a free gmail address that’s not your usual email. This is going to be for things you sign up for, like you know, the newsletters, or checklists you download, the Macy’s emails and things like that. This WON’T be for your work or personal email, like from your friends or your mom.

You can make up a name for this email address. There are zero rules here. If your name is Jimena Rodriguez, you could have a gmail address that’s JacksonRuiz@gmail.com. I don’t know. I’m just making this up. You can choose whatever you want! When you try an email address, if it’s already taken, gmail will tell you, and you can just add some numbers at the end to make it unique, ok?

Now, record this email address and password on your password list, just so you can access it in the future if you want to. But really, I think you should go to this email address as little as possible. This is for unimportant email, right? The Macy’s One Day Sale email? It can go here! If you really want to see it, you can log into this email and check it out. 

Here’s the deal: To reach Beautiful Living, as in Organizing for Beautiful Living, the name of this podcast, I believe we need to be intentional about what we buy. If we’re just buying things because they happen to be on sale, that’s not intentional. That’s reactionary. Instead, when you need something, or are anticipating something, like a birthday or Christmas, or you just want to buy something specific, then go to those store websites and find a sale, or wait until the next special occasion sale. You know when those are, right? Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, all the holidays.

OK, so now you have this new email address. From now on, anytime you want to download a checklist, or sign up for a sale notice from a store, or just subscribe to something, do it with this email address.

Step 3: In your regular email, go back to your regular email, Unsubscribe Ruthlessly!
During these 2 hours you’ve blocked off, start unsubscribing to stores, newsletters that you really don’t read anymore, daily news digests, Daily trivia or memes that somehow got your email.

If there’s no unsubscribe button, block the sender.

By the way, there is a tool that can help, I know I told you I was going to make it simple, but this tool is actually relatively simple. if you really want another tool other than your own fingers. It’s called unroll.me. It’s free. You watch a little youtube video to see how to set it up with your whatever email service you use, Google, Outlook, whatever. It connects to your email account, and it shows you everything you’re subscribed to in a list, everything that’s at that email address that you subscribed to, and you can choose to keep or unsubscribe to any email subscription it finds, and you can put subscriptions you keep in their Roll-up list, meaning it rolls up those subscription emails into one daily digest you receive per day. Now, you can can always go back and resubscribe to anything you accidentally unsubscribed from, or remove it from the daily roll-up and have it hit your inbox in real time. It’s so easy. You just hit the Keep, Inscribe, or Roll-Up button. Ok?

Unroll.me saves a ton of time, guys. It’s free. I’m not selling this to you, ok. So yes, it takes a few minutes to connect it to your email, you watch the video and pause and follow along. But then the unsubscribing is so fast and so easy!

When I first did this on my personal email account, it found these subscriptions with email addresses from Russia that I didn’t recognize the names of the companies at all! So for me, it was well worth the effort.

If you need help to set it up, just call me, text me or email me. We can do it in one short virtual session together online, ok?

So that’s the unsubscribe part. But I said, Unsubscribe ruthlessly!

Every store email list, Uber, Lyft, the airlines, I was on email lists from candidates running for local office in my town from years ago. Don’t know how I got on those, but there they were! Anyway, just unsubscribe. You can resubscribe if you want later. That’s fine.

Unsubscribing from an email list does not mean that you won’t receive confirmation emails when you buy something from their website. So often, when you buy something from a website, you are accepting to automatically be added to their marketing email list. That’s slowly changing, but just so you know, you can unsubscribe and still get all your purchase confirmations. If there are checkboxes on the checkout page in fine print, read them and then you choose.

Step 4: Go back into your regular email inbox, and create an Archive folder.
OK, this is one time you’re going to have to create something within your email, ok? Most email services already have an Archive folder. You just want to make sure you see where it is. Ok? Visually see where it is. If you don’t see it, you can create a new folder. And if the word “Archive” makes you anxious because it feels like you’ll never see the things in there again, call it something else, like “Bulk” or “Old Stuff” or "Reference". Whatever you like.
If you don’t know how to do this, again, email, text or call me. We’ll set up a quick appointment and we’ll do it together.

Now, Step 5: This is the one that’s a little scary, ok?
All right. Stay with me. I can hold your hand virtually while you’re doing this.

I want you to highlight ALL the emails in your inbox right now, select all of them. If there’s a Select All button, click the Select All button, and move them all to that Archive folder.

Did you just say, “No way?” OK hold up.

We are not deleting them! They are still there, they are still searchable. We’re just moving them out of your Inbox.

Really. Do it. Really. Right now. Do it.

And so here’s why this works. From this point onwards, you will be in control of your email.

You won’t lose anything again, cause you’ll know where it is, what to do with it, ok?

I’m going to go ahead and assume you’ve done Step 5. You created the Archive folder and you moved all of the emails in your inbox to the Archive.

Now, let’s move on to how you’ll maintain control over your email from now on.

So from now on, Step 6: From now on, you’ll only do one of 4 things with any email you receive every day:
There will only - you make a choice between these 4 things, ok? You’ll either:
Delete it. If it’s junk, delete it, or unsubscribe and delete, or block the sender and delete if there’s no unsubscribe button. Now, If it’s something just informational to you, you’ve read it and you don’t need it anymore, well, read it and delete it. You’ve got the information, delete it.
You can Reply to it, and then move it to the Archive folder. It’ll still be there, and if someone replies to that thread, it will still come to your inbox, ok? So don’t be afraid that the original email is in the archive. Any reply to that will come to your inbox.
Schedule it. If it’s something you need to schedule, to do, then create a schedule appointment for it, and move the email to the archive folder. Now, don’t be my friend with the DMV appointment! Do put it on your appointment, on your calendar, before moving it to your archive. OK?
Reference it. If it’s something you think you’ll need to reference later on, like an article you think you you you  want to read but don’t have time to do right now, then move it to the archive folder to read later.

Now, those are the 4 decisions you need to make about your email, ok? There’s a ton more you could do with each email. You can set up rules to do something special with emails from a specific sender, like your boss, or your mom.

You can use flags to keep track of something and then set up a reminder right within your email program to bring that email back up to the top your inbox on a specific day.

You can flag stuff with different color flags or labels, move them to your archive, and then on a specific day, come back and take care of those. My NAPO colleague, Karen, does this. We have a ton of email threads going back and forth right now as we prepare for our annual summit. We’re volunteers, so that isn’t our job-job. So she flags all those during the week while she’s working, and then on the weekend, she’ll go back and she’ll take care of all the flagged emails. And then, she’ll archive or delete them.

I mean, our email programs are super sophisticated, and they can really make you more productive with your emails. But today, I just really want you to get control over that inbox! Don’t overcomplicate it if rules and labels and tags and flags isn’t your thing, OK?

So let’s remember the 6 steps:
Step 1: Schedule a block of time to work on your email.
Step 2: Create a new free gmail address and start using it for all your subscriptions that aren’t important, like stores, airlines, checklist downloads, things like that.
Step 3: Unsubscribe ruthlessly. Use unroll.me if you want to make it really fast.
Step 4: Create an Archive folder.
Step 5: the scary one, Move all the emails in your inbox to your archive folder.
And Step 6: From this point on, there are only 4 things you need to decide, on of 4 decisions you need to make with with each email:
Will you Delete it, Reply to it (then archive it), Schedule it (then archive it), or Reference it (meaning, move it to the archive to read later)?

That’s it. Do these 6 steps, and you’re going to feel better about not missing anything anymore. Your anxiety and stress about accidentally losing an email will be gone.

And you want to know something? A lot of the time, people who do this will end up deleting a bunch of the emails they moved to the Archive folder once they see they never really needed it anyway!

But remember, if you need help, I’m here. I can meet you on Zoom for 30 minutes or for an hour appointment and help you through it. Just let me know.

Ok? So go ahead and declutter your email! Because an Organized home, and email, sets you up for living beautifully.

I’ll see you all next week.

Oh! I almost forgot! Don’t forget to take the quiz! What’s Your Organizing Personality? The quiz is short, it’ll take you, I swear, less than 30 seconds, and you’ll find out what type of organizing help would work best for you. The link to take the quiz is in the show notes, it’s fireflybridge.com/quiz. Have a great week!