Hello… My name is Lela, and I am a recovering Email Hoarder.

Do you fall into either one of these categories? If you do, you may be an Email Hoarder.

The first email you ever received is still in your inbox, and its 4 years later.
Currently you have more email than can be humanly managed to be considered reasonable.

See, this was me. Even though in the past I have taught time management, and recently became certified in it. I knew I needed help myself. So, I went to Lynda.com. I took a course to help me to manage my life and my mail more efficiently. The course I chose was “Time Management Fundamentals” with Dave Crenshaw.

Here is just one skill I learned from Dave. This may seem like common sense to you. However, as I have learned, common sense is not that common. If you use Outlook as I do, create a subfolder called “Resources” or whatever you want to call it. After you create this folder chuck all your mail older than 2 weeks to a month in the folder. Then begin reviewing your most recent emails that are left in your inbox.

Now the practice is if you have 100 emails allot yourself 1 hour to review them. Now in the case of the email, you have placed in your “Resources folder” make space on your calendar, at least an hour a day to start sorting this folder out. For me, a lot of the emails I was able to delete since they were newsletters or copies of emails I already had saved in the Cloud from my Gmail account. If you want to be more efficient and know that some of the emails you will need to examine in the future, create sub folders for those emails i.e. Newsletters about Startups.

To make my sort easier I used Outlook’s pre-defined filters and sorted the folder by “From”. Then any emails I knew that should be filed further or deleted I could process with just a glimpse. I was able to process 3 times as many emails in the 1 hour I had allotted myself.

If you found this article helpful. Feel free to share it or comment below.