Making Your Inbox Work for You

Last week, we focused on clearing the digital clutter through unsubscribing and archiving. Today, we move from the cleanup to the construction of a better system. Whether your inbox is currently chaotic or freshly cleared, the goal is to build a structure that handles community commitments, client needs, and family logistics without competing for your attention.

This week, episode 311 of the Positively Living® Podcast is about how to organize your inbox so it stops being a source of stress and starts being a system for living well!

In this episode of the Positively Living® Podcast, I share how to use filters, labels, and strategic forwarding to ensure your inbox supports your real life.

Key Takeaways:

• Automate with Filters: Set up automated instructions to apply labels or archive emails based on specific criteria, such as the sender or subject line.
• Create Intuitive Folders: Build labels that match how you naturally search for information, whether by topic or by sender.
• Avoid Overcomplicating Categories: Use larger, intentional categories instead of creating a folder for every single thing to prevent a different form of overwhelm.
• Route Information Strategically: Use forwarding to keep collaborators in the loop or send action-oriented emails directly to a task manager like Todoist.
• Flag for Follow-Up: Utilize the starring feature as a lightweight way to curate a list of emails that require your attention later.
• Distinguish Archive from Delete: Archive for intentional preservation of items like contracts, while deleting anything that has served its purpose and is no longer needed.
• Define the Tool: Treat your inbox as a decision-making tool rather than a primary to-do list.

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Learn more about Positively LivingⓇ and Lisa at https://positivelyproductive.com/podcast/

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Ep 310: Easy Ways to Declutter Your Inbox 

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Transcript

Lisa Zawrotny: 0:22

Don't over complicate it. The temptation is to create a folder for everything, which just recreates the overwhelm in a different form. I've seen this when I was doing professional organizing and we were working on paper files, this desire to get really granular when it comes to the folders. So I offer the same advice when creating paper files or folders, as well as in your digital storage areas, you want to be intentional and specific, but feel free to create larger categories and then drill down if you start to get too much into one category. You're listening to the positively living podcast. I'm your host. Lisa zaratney, founder of positively productive systems and a productivity coach, certified in positive psychology and stress management, join me as we explore ways to live a more proactive, positive life with episodes on productivity, self awareness, mindset, entrepreneur, life, habits and systems, simplicity, fun and more. I understand overwhelm personally, as a multi passionate entrepreneur, wife and mom to kids and cats and as a caregiver, I'm here to help you choose what's right for you so you can do less, live more and breathe easier. Sound good? Let's get to it. Welcome. To the positively living podcast. I'm your host, Lisa. Last week we talked about decluttering your inbox, clearing out the accumulation with tools like unsubscribing and even the reverse decluttering tactic of creating an old Inbox folder for archived items. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I'd encourage you to go back to Episode 310. Easy Ways to declutter your inbox. But no worries if you're starting here today, because what we're covering in this episode works whether your inbox is freshly cleared or still chaotic. In fact, some of what we're talking about today will help you reduce incoming clutter on its own. So these tactics will help you either way. Today, we're moving from clearing out to building something better. We're talking about how to actually structure and organize your inbox so it works for your real life. You want your email to handle it all your community commitments, your client emails, family, logistics and everything else that lands in the same place and competes for your attention and with each other. This is where your inbox stops being a source of stress and starts being a system for functioning efficiently and living well. Let's start with filters and rules, let your inbox sort itself do some of the heavy lifting for you. The single most powerful thing you can do to organize your inbox going forward is to set up filters. A filter is essentially an instruction you give your email platform. When an email meets a certain criteria, a specific action will happen automatically. It's like magic. Criteria might be a specific sender, a subject line, keyword, or emails going to a particular address or from a particular address. The action might be applying a label or doing something like skipping the inbox entirely by marking something immediately as read and then archived. Here's a real example from my own life. I volunteer as the chair of a program advisory committee for my local Cornell Cooperative Extension, and I serve as President of the Board of Trustees at my local library. Both of those roles generate quite a few emails, meeting invitations, updates, action items that are genuinely important but also have nothing to do with the rest of my personal life and personal correspondence. Now I have separate business and personal email accounts, so that helps, but I chose to use my personal email for the volunteer efforts, and they still need a separate category within my personal life. If those emails were to land in my general inbox, they might either get lost or create noise and block important messages, whether from family and friends or my kids school. So the solution was I filter them directly to their own folders, like skipping the inbox and going right to their own folders, so I can review them separately and specifically when it works for me, they're there when I need them, and they're out of the way when I don't. So think about your own inbox. Are there senders or categories of email that would be better somewhere other than your primary view, a child school, a volunteer organization, a specific client, if you happen to combine one email for all of it, or maybe a recurring service? There's a lot of different options. But. Those are the things you want to think about as filter candidates. Start with two or three and see how much quieter your inbox can get from doing that. Most email platforms have a filter or rule setting feature in Gmail. You'll find it under Settings, and it should be very easy to get to it'll take a couple minutes to set it up once after that, it'll be so easy to set up more as you need it. Next up labels and folders. This is how you make things findable. Now, filters are most useful when it comes to having a place to send things. That's where labels and folders come in. And the reason I'm using both of those words is Gmail. Calls them labels. Everyone else calls them folders, including me. Even when I'm talking about Gmail, I still call them folders. It basically means the categories that let you find emails quickly without relying on search alone, your volunteer folder, client folder, receipts folder, family folder, you name it. If you're not sure which ones to create, consider what you might have as important files in a file cabinet, and start with a few that either need to be together. You get a lot of a category or especially need separating from the pack, because you don't want to miss them. For me, my volunteer efforts were very important, so I started with that, but I also have one for purchases, and that one is especially handy in my business email when tax time rolls around. I've also created folders for events and vacations, medical and activities related to my kids. Now in some cases, these folders are temporary, but when the correspondence is heavy and it's flooding in, it really helps to have a place to stash it all. So eventually you can archive them if you want. A word of caution here, Don't over complicate it. The temptation is to create a folder for everything, which just recreates the overwhelm in a different form. I've seen this when I was doing professional organizing and we were working on paper files, this desire to get really granular when it comes to the folders. So I offer the same advice when creating paper files or folders, as well as in your digital storage areas. You want to be intentional and specific, but feel free to create larger categories and then drill down if you start to get too much into one category, but start larger because search features make scanning much less necessary, make your folders functional and intuitive to you. Think about how you actually look for emails. If you would search for something by sender, make a folder for that sender. If you would search by topic, make folder for that topic. Let your natural search behavior guide your folder structure, rather than trying to anticipate every category up front or trying to make folders you think you should have or that you know make sense to everyone else. The only one it needs to make sense for is you. The next tip is forwarding. That's routing email to the right place or person. Forwarding is an underused tool, and it works in two ways. The first is forwarding to people. If an email comes in that belongs to someone else, like a team member, a family member, a collaborator, you can automatically forward it rather than remembering who to send it to and doing that manually. It saves you time and brain power. This tactic is important when you need to keep others in the loop, and it can also be a great backup for things you don't want to miss. Great example of this is my son is navigating college financial aid right now, and we set up a system where those emails from like FAFSA automatically forward to me as a backup. This way he doesn't miss anything, and neither do I, and we both feel a little more secure about it. The second option is forwarding to systems. If you use a task manager, many of them have a dedicated email address you can forward to and the email becomes a task automatically. This is particularly useful for action oriented emails, something a client sends that requires follow up or a request that needs to be tracked. Now, I personally use Todoist for this, because it's a simple, affordable management system with, by the way, a very robust, free option, which I've been using for the longest time, and it has Gmail integration that lets you turn any email into a task directly from your inbox, without having to set up forwarding. If you're working solo or don't need the more robust project management features of things like Asana or Trello or clickup, then Todoist is definitely worth a look. Now if you want to check out any of these task management options that I've mentioned, you can find links directly to them on my resources page of the positively productive.com website. Positively productive.com/resources you want to scroll down a bit and you'll see logos and links and full disclosure. Those are my affiliate links. So if you click on them, check them out. You like a platform, you sign up. I may benefit from that. So thank you. You may also want to check out my tech tools playlist on the podcast page of the positively productive.com site. Positively productive.com/podcast it covers the big project and task management tools like clickup, Asana, Trello and airtable. These are all fantastic episodes with guests who are very knowledgeable about each of them. You may get a big kick out of the asana one, because that hasn't always been my favorite. And I brought someone on to see if she could convince me otherwise, and she did a really good job. All right. Next Tool is starring. This is your built in follow up flag. Starring is a small, but genuinely useful feature that often gets overlooked. Most email platforms have a starring or flagging function in Gmail. It's the little star icon on any email, and you'll also see the star option in Google Drive as well. Starring can be used as a simple signal that says, this needs my attention again. I don't want to misplace this. And it's especially handy if there isn't a dedicated folder or another place you're sending the email. It could be an email you read but didn't have time right now to act on, or something you're waiting on a response for, so you want to keep it in an important kind of VIP zone of your email system. Maybe it's an invitation you haven't responded to yet, but whatever it is, if it's something that you want to keep around and revisit in some way. You can star it, move on and then come back easily. The real power comes from filtering your emails, which we talked about before. And in this case, it's so simple, on the left sidebar, you click starred, and instead of hunting through your inbox for things that need action, you've got a curated list waiting for you, all the starred items will show up in their own category. So this is a lightweight way to manage follow up without needing a separate system. Starring emails can also be a great way to create your first groups or categories to see what you want to pull together, and then you can unstar them later, once you have a different organizational system for them. Now, when we talk about decluttering and organizing, like we did in last week's episode and this week's episode, archiving and deleting both come into play. So I want to make a clear distinction between the two. Deleting is a confident release when an email has served its purpose or it never had one and you don't need it anymore. So this might include receipts for small purchases that you have input elsewhere, or newsletters you've read, or expired promotions or notifications that are simply no longer relevant. Archiving is intentional preservation of email that might matter later, a contract, a confirmation, a meaningful exchange with someone you want it accessible, but also out of the way. The mistake many people make is archiving everything. It's a way of avoiding the decision of what to do with these things, and it falls into that, but I might need it, or I hate to lose it, mentality, which I understand, I really do. I've worked with a lot of people to declutter, and I know how difficult it can be to release things that you worry you might need it, but I will caution you that if you archive indiscriminately, your archive becomes another version of the cluttered inbox, maybe not as bad because of search features, but it might technically be organized in the sense that it's archived, but you are going to have to sort through a lot more to find things, and your storage is going to be hit, and you're going to use a lot more storage for these files. And that may not seem like a big deal to start, but over time, it can have an impact on your technology. So if you genuinely can't imagine needing something again, or you can find the information elsewhere, delete it. Your storage will thank you, and so will your future self when you're trying to find what's actually important. As we close this episode today, I'll leave you with a potentially controversial take your inbox is not a to do list, it's a communication tool intended to get in. Information from one place to the next, so decisions can be made and tasks can be completed. And like any tool, it works best when it's set up for the job you actually need it to do, and set up in a way that actually works for you the steps we covered today, filters, labels, forwarding, strategically starring, archiving, intentionally or deleting, can be used on any kind of inbox, no matter the purpose of it, no matter the level of clutter, no matter the specific technology or platform. You can implement any one of them right now and feel a difference, if you like the sound of that, but you feel hesitant to do it on your own. I'd love to help you. I welcome you to book a clarity call with me. This is a first step for new clients that gives you a sense of how I coach and will help you figure out what your specific setup should look like, what folders make sense for your life, which filters would actually serve you, how to connect your email to other systems you use, and other aspects of setting up your email to make it work for you, you can learn more and book a time that works for you through the coaching page, on the positively productive.com website, positively productive.com/coaching you'll be able to See the clarity call as well as the other packages. Remember your inbox should be working for you, not the other way around. If sorting through your email feels like way more work than it should be, I encourage you to pick one tip from today and try it. You'll start to see what happens when your inbox is organized to support you.