Clean Sweep: Email Communication Skills to Unclutter Your Inbox

Is your inbox looking like a hot mess? Use these email communication skills to fix that easily!

I have a confession: I’m a neat freak.

The feeling of a clean desk, room or car always leaves me at ease. Whether it’s organizing our pantry, putting clothes away, sorting through taxes, tidying the house or general cleaning--they all give me an overwhelming feeling of happiness.

However, if there is one thing that I can’t keep in order, it is my email inbox.

To defend my case, I have a few email accounts that are very hard to keep in order. Between my personal and professional email, I am an “email hoarder”. Deleting emails or sorting them into folders has never been my cup of tea. They sit in my inbox and slowly accumulate to the point where it takes me at least 4 minutes to find the email I am looking for. Half the time, I have to search for the email of the individual that sent me the message or I search via keywords from the subject line.

About 2 weeks ago, I figured it was time for change. I, Taylor - neat freak, will now take my organization tips from cleaning and apply them to my email inbox. When you have emails built up for 3 months it’s a little overwhelming at first. I am about to walk you through the steps I used with my new email communication skills that took me from a cluttered inbox to an organized, clear and easily accessible one!

ADMITTING THE PROBLEM AND SOLVING IT

Admitting is always the first step.

I had a problem and I needed to solve it before my inbox got out of control. After consulting with a few of my co-workers, I found out the magic of various email communication skills I could use to finally get my inbox as organized as I am in real life. The magic of “starring” important emails, labels and folders left me in awe. How did I not know about these for the past 10 years of using email?! After learning about these beautiful skills, it was time to actually apply them to my mess I called an inbox.

KEEP OR TOSS?

I finally found a way to keep important emails without deleting them by using one of the oldest tricks from elementary school, giving them a gold star.

No, I don’t mean a physical gold star (unfortunately), I’m talking about the star that appears when you tag an email as important.

Prior to this discovery, I always kept emails in my inbox that were important which was another downfall to my cluttered inbox. Now, there was a way to keep them in my account without deleting them as well as not having them show up on my home inbox, leaving me to easily find other emails I need! I actually use this tool with all my email accounts now and whenever I need to refer back to an important email, I search for the star and there it is! Easily accessible.

Saving these important emails reminded me of how I organize important documents in my house. Whenever I have an important document or receipt, I have a special binder to keep them in. This reminds me of the archives section of my inbox. A special place where you can easily refer back to an important document when you are approaching a deadline or find an important piece of information when a situation arises.

This email communication skills really helped me start out the clean sweep of my inbox, but the real tools that helped me out were labels and folders — the real MVPs of my inbox.

STARS AND LABELS

If it wasn’t for these two email communication skills, I don’t even want to think about how out of hand my inbox would have gotten if I hadn’t discovered these sooner. Although, archives helped my inbox start to get in order, these two were the ones to really get my life in order (virtually).

With folders, it is like having a file folder on your desktop. With each email you get, you are able to move it to a special folder that contains emails very similar to that message. For example, our office communicates via Vings through our company email addresses. With each Ving I get, I move the message to a special folder specifically for Vings we send to each other. That way, I am able to easily refer back to the Ving if I ever need to view it once more or just want to learn new exciting ways to use our product!

After finishing up the sorting the rest of my emails into special folders, it was now time to use the magic that is labels. When using labels, you are able to label emails into categories and even color code them with corresponding colors so you are easily able to find them in your inbox. This was very useful for the emails I saved to my inbox home page. When I am looking at the inbox I am able to see the color of the box next to my email and immediately know what type of email it is. For examples, when I get Ving e-mails they show up green because our company color is green.

I view these email communication skills like color coding and labeling things when it comes to organization. Organization is one of my strong points and while I was cleaning my inbox, I found that it was similar to when I organized our pantry over the summer. With each food item, I labeled it in a special place and color coded various cookbooks we save in the bottom shelf of the pantry. Once I found out there was a way to color code and label emails, I knew I had to clean my inbox and make it organized.

With these email communication skills, I can happily say that I am no longer an “email hoarder” and am now the owner of a visually beautiful inbox that is color coded and labeled to near perfection. Hopefully, the inbox will stay organized but I have a feeling these skills have really helped me become organized virtually as well as in actual reality.

Want to make your emails visually beautiful like an organized inbox? Try Ving today and change the way your office communicates!