It is easy to feel overwhelmed when you have to tackle hundreds or maybe thousands of emails sitting in your inbox. I want to encourage you that it is possible to manage them. Your main objective should be to sort through and elimiate unwanted emails so that you can get down to filing the emails that are important. Here is my advice on how to accomplish this task.

Create one temporary folder that you put all the old emails into. That way they are out of your inbox and you can deal with all the new incoming email without stressing over the old stuff. Don’t worry, I will show you how to deal with your old email. For now, just make the folder and put them in there.

Next, create folders where you can file your emails. Suggestions on folders are: Read, Action and Archive. Don’t create too many folders. You could end up forgetting to deal with what’s in them. Keep it simple.  If you share your email account with the family, create folders for each person, then put Read, Action and Archive folders inside your folder.  It would look something like this:

Mom

• Read
• Action
• Archive

Dad

Son

Daughter

Use the 4 D’s to manage all new incoming email. That way you will get into the habit of dealing with your email on a regular basis so it doesn’t pile up. The key is to continue to act decisively on each email rather than letting them pile up in your inbox.

Now it is time to work on your old emails. Apply the 4 D’s and use the folders you created. Don’t get caught up in reading through every message. Read just enough to make a decision. Act quickly and decisively. Don’t over analyze. The idea is to sort and eliminate so that you get things down to a manageable amount. Do as much as you can in one sitting. If you can’t finish it in one sitting, come back to it later. If you have  a lot of emails it will probably take you a few hours to sort through the entire inbox.  We had a member with over 4,000 emails and it took her about 2 hours to deal with all of them.

Delete the temporary fold when you are done sorting. Now you can go back and deal with any detailed responses.

That’s all there is to it. Bye-bye stuffed inbox!