3 Great Ways to Overcome Email Overload

If you spend most of your day trying to get to the elusive “Inbox Zero,” you’re doing it all wrong. Sorting and answering those emails that come in all day and throughout the night can be a full-time job of its own. Worse, it can distract you from focusing on the real work that needs to be done. It’s time to get control of your email.

The best way to tackle email overload is to set aside a certain amount of time each day to answer emails. Some prefer to attack the inbox first thing in the morning. Others would rather hit their to-do list first--perhaps after a quick scan of emails for anything urgent, and then take on email chores later in the day once they’ve accomplished a few tasks. Whenever you engage with email, here are some tips and tricks to tame the tempting inbox: 

1. Use Labels to Sort Email 

Whether you use Google’s Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, there are ways to use folders and labels to sort your messages. In Gmail, you can use brightly-colored labels to organize emails on specific topics or projects, and you’re not limited to just one. For instance, you can create the label “working” or “Project X” and find those using a quick scan or a search. To create and manage labels in Gmail, head to settings and then click the Labels tab.

In Outlook use folders to quickly sort your mail. Create folders within your inbox and drag and drop an email to the intended folder. This takes the message out of your main inbox leaving you with fewer unread emails.

2. Creating Filters 

Here’s a real time saver. Stop sorting each piece of email like the US Post Office. Let your email program do it for you. Gmail filters let you label, archive or even delete emails without them ever showing up in your inbox.

• Step 1: To send email that’s not a priority to a folder where you can find it later, open the email and click the “more” button on top of the screen.
• Step 2: Now click “Filter messages like these.” You’ll see a pop-up window with the email address of the sender already filled in.
• Step 3: Now select “create a filter.” From here you’ll see a box with different options. I generally select Skip the Inbox (archive it) and then apply a label.

 Now, next time you get an email from your car dealer about the weekly specials, it will be automatically sent to a specific folder you can peruse when you have time.

Outlook also lets you create rules to sort emails from a specific sender or by subject.

• Step 1: Create a rule by right-clicking on the message you want to move.
• Step 2: Decide where you want the message to go.

• Step 3: Run the rule on the emails in your inbox. There’s something especially satisfying about watching all those emails fly to their new folder out of your main inbox.

One feature particularly useful for managers: you can create a rule to show you email sent directly only to you--not copied to you. So, if your team tends to copy you on everything that’s going on, you can sort and save those emails for later in the day after you’ve tended to the items sent directly to you.

3. Remove the Temptation 

Turn off email notifications and social media alerts. When I’m on deadline trying to finish a story, nothing is more distracting that an alert about a new email I know I could handle and deal with in under a minute.

But even that one minute sets me back 10 minutes or more because once I’m on the email screen, I get sucked in, or click one more message, or get distracted by Facebook or Twitter or my way back to my writing project. The easiest way to keep this from happening; turn off email alerts so nothing pops up to distract you.

There are even more ways to sort your emails, from using Gmail’s categorized tabs to third party apps that claim to know which emails are most important to you. In the next column, we’ll take a look at the top apps for taming emails. In the meantime, how do you deal with the daily deluge of email?

We’d like to know.