How to Organize your Email Inbox

Inbox overload.

It's a real time eater, and you only have so much time to build your business.

And if your inbox eats your time, you don't build as much business each day.

So one of the easiest ways to find more time to build your business is to cure inbox overload.

Here are three ways to help combat the overload:

1. Create filters for spam

During WWII, spam meant “specially processed American meat”, and it was shipped to overseas for use by servicemen and women, and the local population in Britain. Of course, it really amounted to food that was much less than the best available. That’s because it had to be put in a can.

SPAM today can hardly be thought of nutrition on any level. It’s the junk mail of the Internet, and if you don’t have a method for getting it out of you inbox, then you’ll never get out of it either.

Most ISPs have SPAM filters that prevent you from getting a lot of it. In other words, however much you get right now, it could be a lot worse.

But spammers are clever people, and as ISPs change their filters, so spammers change the wording of their messages to bypass them.

That means that in order to get rid this junk without having to personally wade through it all, you need to use the filter template that is provided by your email client.

In Gmail, for example, the most effective way is to filter on the basis of specific words and the various spellings. Then whenever a message that you don’t want somehow gets through, it will be deleted before you ever see it.

2. Create filters for each business function, e.g. social media, sales, marketing, articles, ideas, etc.

There will be some messages that you will want to see, and you can choose to put them in a separate folder, too.

Instead of having them deleted, you can designate which folders they will go to automatically. This can be particularly valuable if you want to read messages that are written by the same person, such as those you’d get from someone’s email campaign.

3. Set up Google Alerts

A Google Alert automatically delivers content to you based on words that you choose.

In the case of SPAM, you identified words associated with messages that you didn’t want. 

With a Google Alert, you use exactly the same principle to find what you do want, except that instead of receiving messages, you’re given URLs.

And you can have all of these go to a specific folder as well.

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