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11 Tips for Managing Email More Efficiently

Productivity expert Jill Duffy shows you how adopting a few simple tricks can help you organize your email. Taking a little time to learn new habits now could save you countless hours down the road

By Jill Duffy
Updated July 15, 2019
11 Tips for Managing Email

Email can make us feel like we're struggling to keep our heads above water. Is your inbox pages long? Do you begin every day reading email, thinking you'll reply to the most important messages, only to look up and realize an hour has slipped by and you've done nothing so far? Are you running out of space for your email every few days? Does email feel like a productivity multiplier, or a productivity killer?

Get Organized Bug Art It only takes a few simple tricks to get more efficient at dealing with email so you don't feel weighed down by it. Some of these tips rely on functions found in most email programs, but others are ways of changing your own habits so that the little everyday interactions you have with email help you keep on track with managing it.

Think about it like cleaning your teeth. There's a difference between daily dental hygiene and going to a dentist, but you have to do both. You should brush twice a day and floss once a day, and those habits are extremely important to having healthy teeth. Every six months, you should also visit a dentist for a more thorough cleaning, x-rays, and other preventative care. Daily hygiene prevents larger problems from building up. Visits to the dentist help you catch and correct burgeoning problems before they get out of control.

Of course, even with teeth, things can go wrong. An accident could knock them out or your genes may end up impacting them, just as a new project or change in job position could suddenly cause an explosion of email. Whatever the case, it doesn't mean you should stop flossing or seeing a dentist regularly—or cleaning up your email every day. If you have an unexpected problem, you still need to follow good habits to keep everything in check.

When you change how you interact with email in the short term—when and how you check it, how often you delete messages, and so forth—it makes your life easier in the long run.

Here are a few top tips for making email less of a burden. Let me warn you that these tips are rooted in common sense and don't provide a magic bullet, which means they won't blow your mind or become an overnight sensation. But neither will flossing.

1. Delete First

The first thing to do when you open your inbox is scan to see what you can delete. Look at the subject line and the sender. Is it junk? Is it a promotional email that you're never going to read? Is it a notice from your co-worker saying in the subject line that they'll be out today, and there's next to no chance that any additional information in the body of the email will be relevant to you? If so, throw it out.

All messages you identify as unimportant should be selected and moved to the trash in bulk. If you're not in a rush on a particular morning you might even try to identify one or two regular emailers to unsubscribe from.

Get Organized - delete first

Why does it matter to do this step first? When you delete irrelevant messages immediately, you make it easier to see the remaining messages. When you can see the remaining messages, you can triage the important ones quicker. If you can identify even five or ten percent of your daily incoming mail as "very likely not requiring action" so that you can delete it promptly, you'll be in much better shape to start your day productively.

2. Use More Than One Email Address

I cannot stand marketing emails or shipping confirmations, much less reminders from my bank to pay my credit card bill when it's already set up for auto-pay. (Grr.) All these messages would clutter my inbox and make it harder to spot important emails, except that I have a strategy for dealing with them.

I use a separate email address for all these messages of low importance.

There are a few ways to do it. You can set up a new email account entirely for this purpose, which is how I do it, or you can create an alias address using your current account. Most email providers let you do that. Then, you create a rule or filter in your email account so that all messages sent to the alias skip the inbox and go into a different folder. Call it Inbox 2 or Low Importance or whatever you want.

One benefit of using a separate email address for this purpose is you keep this not-quite-junk mail, sometimes called gray mail, separate from your important mail. Additionally, if a company sells your email address to another distribution list, any new and unwanted marketing messages won't end up in your primary inbox either. A third benefit is you aren't distracted by these messages, considering you have to log into another email program or navigate to a different inbox to access them.

3. Write Short

When writing emails, say what you mean, be clear, and be concise. Why? Writing short helps the people who read your message get to the point and process their email more efficiently. They may pick up on your tone and reply in kind, which will make life easier for you.

Some situations call for complete sentences and formal language, but fragments can be extremely effective in email. Use them when it makes sense. The grammar police aren't going to come after you. Certainly, sometimes you need to be highly detailed and take advantage of the paper-trail aspect of email—there's a record of everything. Generally speaking, however, default to concise, clear, and straightforward language.

Not everyone is adept at brevity and it can come off as curt. To avoid sounding unfriendly, you can add an emoji or exclamation points. Or simply let people know that you try to be concise in email and they shouldn't take it personally.

4. Use Groups or Distribution Lists

Get Organized - tips for grouping

If you send a message to the same group of people repeatedly, set up a group or email alias. In Outlook, it's called a Distribution List. In Gmail, go to Contacts (contacts.google.com), select the people you want to add to a group, and click the label icon. Give your group a name. Once it saves, you can type that name to automatically compose a message to everyone in the group.

Using groups not only saves time by eliminating the need to type each person's name when you mail the group, but also sets you up for easy deleting tactics, as I explain a little later.

5. Create Templates or Canned Responses

If there's a message that you send over and over, don't write it from scratch each time. Reuse what you've already written by making a template or canned response, as Gmail calls it.

A few examples of messages people send frequently are along the lines of:

  • Thanks for reaching out, but I'm not interested,
  • Confirming receipt. Thank you and please let me know if you need anything else from my end, and
  • That sounds like a job for our legal department. The best point of contact is…

Once you have a few templates set up, you can reply to messages that would normally take up unnecessary time without even thinking much about it, letting you get on with more important work.

6. Reuse Subject Lines

Reusing sent messages via templates and canned responses increases your efficiency by minimizing writing. Reusing subject lines lets you more easily and quickly delete or archive old messages. I'll explain how next.

7. Sort to Delete

Data limits can sneak up on anyone, even highly organized people. The way to free up some space is to delete messages you don't need in bulk. This is the kind of chore you can think of as being similar to going to the dentist. You don't have to do it every day, but doing it periodically and regularly will help prevent bigger problems. I find three methods of deleting to be particularly helpful.

First, sort your sent mail by file size or attachment and throw away the largest ones that you don't need. The reason I focus on sent messages is because if I sent an attachment, there's a good chance I own the file and therefore I have another copy saved somewhere else.

Get Organized - sort sent mail

The second method is to sort sent mail by subject line and look for messages that you send on a regular basis. If you send a weekly message with the subject line "Refrigerator cleaning at 4 p.m. today," you can quickly see, select, and delete them all at once.

Third, sort your messages by recipient. You probably have a few colleagues, friends, or groups of people that you email often. It's likely that many of the messages sent between you and them are not highly important. If you'll never need them again, select multiple messages at once and delete them en masse.

8. Turn Off Notifications, Close Email to Focus

Getting an on-screen alert about every incoming message is incredibly interruptive and distracting. I'd guess that the overwhelming majority of workers would be better off with email alerts completely disabled. It's only helpful in the rarest of cases. So, turn off your notifications.

Similarly, close your email application or its browser tab when you need to do highly focused work for at least 30 minutes. It pains me to write that tip, knowing that almost no one will follow it. Very few people actually do it, but I wish I could convince more people to try. Imagine how much easier it will be to find your flow when you aren't distracted by email.

Think back to the last time you worked offline, whether it was on an airplane without Wi-Fi or when your internet was down. Or maybe you've worked from a time zone where you don't have many other colleagues and therefore had no email interruptions for a long stretch of your day. By closing email, you get close to replicating that experience of not being interrupted, while still being able to access other online information as needed.

9. Co-opt Auto Replies

Get Organized - vacation response

Related to the previous tip, let's say you won't close your email window because you're worried someone will try to contact you with an urgent matter and you'll miss it. The workaround? Set up an out-of-office or auto-reply message that says, "If this is a highly urgent matter, please text/call/message me on..." and give your phone number, Slack handle, or preferred line of communication.

10. Delete! Or File Mail Into Folders

An undeleted email is often a good intention that has gone unfulfilled. Know when to let go. Don't hang onto messages if you will likely never do anything with them. Leaving unimportant messages in your inbox is highly unproductive, distracting, and only reminds you of what you would like to do in a perfect world, but can't.

They aren't doing you any favors by being in your inbox.

If deleting messages seems severe, move them to a new folder instead. Call that folder Pending or Good Intentions. The important thing is to get them out of your Inbox. Wait a few months. See how many you ever dug up or responded to. If the answer is zero, perhaps reconsider deleting them in the first place.

11. Empty the Trash Periodically

Empty the trash periodically. Deleting the trash clears up space. Most email programs, including Outlook, have a setting for automatically dumping the trash when you quit the app. If you never remember to dump the trash, I recommend turning on that feature.

Most people probably don't need to empty the trash more than once a month or once a quarter. There is a danger in deleting your trash too often, as the trash is where you go to rescue emails that you thought you didn't need, but it turns out you do. I've rescued many a message from the trash bin, usually on the same day I put it there.

How to Pull the Emergency Cord

Now, if you're desperate for a clean slate with your inbox, here's one last trick you can try:

1. Create a new folder. Name it Old Inbox or Mail Before July 2019 (or the current month and year).

2. Select everything in your inbox. Move it all to the new folder.

Voilà. You're at inbox zero, and you didn't even have to throw out a single message.

No one expects you to overhaul a chaotic inbox overnight. Adapt a few positive habits little by little. Do a few of the periodic actions, such as emptying the trash or bulk deleting sent mail, to help you feel like you're making progress.

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About Jill Duffy

Columnist and Deputy Managing Editor, Software

I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized, has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.

My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work, which goes into great detail about a subject that I've been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.

Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I've also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.

Follow me on Mastodon.

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