Biannual Blogathon Bash Mini Challenge – Organizing Your Email

This is a mini challenge for the Biannual Blogathon Bash. Anyone is welcome to benefit from it but to be eligible to win prizes, you must be signed up as a participant and have done your kick off post.

Who has more than 100 emails in their email program? More than 500? More than 1000? My hand is up.

I get so many between email subscriptions, newsletters, notifications, messages from friends, pitches from companies and of course spam. I just can’t keep up! It gets overwhelming.

Here are some tips for email organization:

1.  Don’t let everything come in to your inbox. Create folders and add message rules to direct incoming emails into those folders. I have one for blog subscriptions, one for twitter notifications, one for posts from a certain online group and more. I also have folders that I manually move certain emails too after I’ve read them but need to keep them. I have a save folder for bill notifications and sign up emails. I have a Waiting for Action folder for pitches I’ve received and replied to but am waiting a response and for contacts that are waiting for me to email them their review or sponsored post link.
2. Speaking of notifications, do you really need them? If you check facebook everyday anyways (or more than once a day) then you don’t need email notifications. Go into your facebook setting and get rid of them. Do you really want to be notified when someone follows you on twitter? If not, change your settings. 
3. Look at the newsletters you receive. Do you actually read and use them? Or have you been deleting them everytime they come in because they just aren’t interesting you? We often sign up for things to get a reward or because they sound good at the time but then later decide they aren’t what we need. Why we just keep deleting them instead of unsubscribing I don’t know. But take the time now to do that. Pair down the subscriptions and newsletters that you don’t really love.
4. Set up some templates to save you time. Most email programs have a spot where you can create custom signatures to put at the end of your post with the click of a button. But who says they have to be signatures or always at the end? Is there something you often have to email? Make it a signature file and whenever you need it, you can add it with one touch. I have one that introduces my name and blog and what I blog about that I add at the beginning of a pitch. I have another that says politely that I’m not interested in that pitch but thank you. I have a signature that also includes my address so when I’m asked for it AGAIN I don’t have to type it each time. Be creative. This saves time.

Challenge

Your challenge is to eliminate at least 50 emails you no longer need from your email client (if by some chance your email isn’t overflowing like mine and you don’t have 50 that need to go, do as many as you can.) Also check if you need to change your notifications from a website or unsubscribe from some newsletters. If you want to, create a signature for another reason.  Tell me in the comments how you did.

Related Posts:

 – How to Clean Up and Inbox (from ehow.com)
 – Extreme Makeover: The Email Inbox Edition (from blogs.hbr.org)
 – Empty Your Inbox: 4 Ways to Take Control of Your Email (from microsoft.com)