How I organize my inbox.
Today we're tackling the bane of every adult's work life: the terrible, no good cluttered inbox! Staring at a mountain of emails can be overwhelming for anyone. Not to mention, inbox disorganization can bottleneck your productivity, cause you to miss important messages and interrupt vital communication — all of which is definitely no bueno.
This problem inspired me to share a sorting hack I use to easily filter emails into folders, prioritize responses and take action.
In this video, I'll walk you through my system which separates all incoming messages into three simple categories. I'll be using Apple Mail (the default email program for Mac), but this system can easily be implemented on other email clients as well.
If you have any questions, you can email me at: hello@theproductivityshop.co
You can also join the conversation and stay updated on time-saving hacks by adding The Productivity Shop Slack channel to your workstation: http://prodshop.co/slack
This problem inspired me to share a sorting hack I use to easily filter emails into folders, prioritize responses and take action.
In this video, I'll walk you through my system which separates all incoming messages into three simple categories. I'll be using Apple Mail (the default email program for Mac), but this system can easily be implemented on other email clients as well.
If you have any questions, you can email me at: hello@theproductivityshop.co
You can also join the conversation and stay updated on time-saving hacks by adding The Productivity Shop Slack channel to your workstation: http://prodshop.co/slack
Transcript
hey I'm Luke and today I'm going to show you how I organize my inbox normally people keep their messages in their inbox and every day they look at a very long list and to me that's very overwhelming my workflow is basically sorting all of your messages into three main folders and then leaving the ones that you're going to take action on right now in your inbox the main folders are done to do and to work the done folder is an archive to save anything that you need to save for business purposes or just things that you want to keep a record of to do are things that you want to do or want to read a review but if you don't do anything at the moment or don't actually get to it then it's not really a big deal examples include design references newsletters cool HTML emails that you want to save or anything that you'd like to save and look at but not file away forever inside of your archive or done folder the to work folder is for messages that you need to take action on or do something about but you're not going to do it exactly right now the remaining messages in your inbox or things that you plan on doing right now and it sort of becomes a to-do list that way you can focus on two or three things that you're gonna do on right now monitor all incoming communications and reprioritize anything if any higher priority incoming email comes in I like to use Apple Mail because it has some really easy to use keyboard shortcuts that will help you navigate between folders and also sort your messages into your folders as they come in I'm going to show you how to set up a gmail account with Apple Mail I know Gmail is pretty popular so that way you can take advantage of the easy to use keyboard shortcuts and have a clean inbox and sort everything as needed I'll also show you how to set up filters for special types of emails for example I have a fonts folder and all of my fonts emails go into that particular folder rather than having to move it manually I'll show you how to do that I'll also show you a tip for your work email a lot of the time email aliases are created to send information out to teams but this information is more of an FYI and not for you directly so I'll show you how to create a filter that will prioritize messages that are directly addressed to you and then put all over the email FY eyes into your to work folder which you can review later since they might not be a higher priority than what is directly addressed to you let's get started okay I'm gonna go ahead and open up mail and this is a fresh user account so I'll start from the beginning as you may be as well I'll select to Google open Safari enter my gmail account I'll go ahead and go through the steps and then we should be good to go I'm gonna change some of the visual preferences to how I like it feel free to change out however you want but this makes the sorting a little bit easier in my opinion so the first step is to go to preferences mail preferences viewing and then I like to use classic layout this will put all of your messages on the top and a preview on the bottom I'll go ahead and move the columns to open them up a little bit there we go and then I also like to change the font size I'll just do that because I'm a little OCD fonts and colors I like lucida grande 11 okay so the first step is to create your three folders I'll show you how to do that will create done to do in to work I'll go to mailbox new mailbox and then here where it says location you can either choose to save it on your Mac and it won't be saved on the server or you can choose it to save on your gmail account and it will be saved on the server there are pluses and minuses to both of these if you put stuff in your to work folder and then you're on your phone or on the go it won't save online so if you have a lot of email space which Gmail does putting it online is fine so I'll keep the vocation for my gmail and I'll type done one more time mailbox new mailbox to do and then mailbox new mailbox to work the next step is to drag these folders into the little menu bar next to mailboxes I'll show you I'll put done here right after mailboxes to do right here in the second position and then to work in the third so the reason why I put them up there and in that particular order the keyboard shortcuts to access those folders are based off of the order so if I want to do done which is the first one I'll do command one to do command two and so on and so on I'll show you we'll go to done so command one to do command two to work command three and then my inbox will be command four okay so let's get to sorting the email now most of these were for did for me for test purposes but let's just pretend that they were forwarded directly from the sender so this is a font email and I want to read this but it's not really important if I don't so I'll go ahead and put it in to do using control command to same thing so control command - I'll put this one as well this one I really want to read but I'm not going to do it exactly right now so I put it in to work this is a receipt that I need to file and I need to do this but also not going to do it right now something that I might want to look at and buy so I'll put that in to do because if I don't buy it you know no biggie probably for the better same thing with this film discounts I'll put it in two as well this billing statement I want to look out right now so I'm going to go ahead and leave it inside of the inbox and then these I'll just put in done they're kind of some leftovers so I can keep a record of my subscribers thanks for watching by the way so now my inbox only has something that I need to do right now or a couple things and it's less overwhelming than looking at a huge wall of emails all the time whenever I'm done with this task I'll go ahead and do ctrl command one to put it inside of the done folder I'll do command three to go back to my work folder and then I'll put both of these inside of my inbox using ctrl command four and now I have a small to-do list of things to do but it's not too overwhelming I check my email every 15 minutes I try not to have a badge in the dock that way it doesn't distract me but when I'm ready and I choose to look at my email I have all of the things that I need to do high-priority inside of my inbox and I also keep an eye on things coming in and can change priorities as needed now I have a lot of font emails and so rather than taking time to sort all of those emails into the to-do folder I go ahead and create a fonts folder so if you have a particular thing that you get a lot of you can create a special folder and then put a filter on it that way you'll save some time sorting I'll show you how to do that I'll go to mail preferences click on rules first add rule I'll call this fonts and then I'm going to go ahead and put some of the font emails back in the inbox normally if when you have the email selected that you want to filter clicking the plus sign will automatically put the email address of the sender in the field but since I forwarded these to myself I'm just going to make a couple changes so this one is my fonts I'll just put message content and then another one is t26 so whenever one of these things arrives it'll go ahead and sort it into the fonts folder it went ahead and applied the rule so the one email that matched is now inside of the fonts folder I created the fonts folder by just making a new mailbox I did mail new mailbox and then instead of saving it online I saved it on my Mac I typed fonts and then it appeared now if you get a ton of emails from work what I would recommend and this sounds crazy but you'll have a happier life I swear basically make a rule that says if an email is not addressed directly to you put it in the to work folder it's kind of like someone saying hey everybody and wanting you to listen versus hey insert your name here you can stay on top of things that are most important which are things that are addressed directly to you rather than keeping on top of all the fYI eyes during your busy day I'll show you how to do that now go to mail preferences click on rules we'll add another rule let's say just me and we'll say if it's not to contains your work email address then move the message to to work so anything not addressed to just you it'll go to to work and it's probably going to take an adjustment and you might not like it you can always delete the rule but if you get tons of emails from JIRA or asana or other things like that this will definitely help you can also make a filter just for JIRA or asana but I kind of put it all in one - work folder that way I can stay on top of it and not have to check multiple folders for updates let me know what you think and if you need any help you can always email me at hello at the productivity shop CEO or join the productivity shop slack channel thanks for watching I'll see you later
hey I'm Luke and today I'm going to show you how I organize my inbox normally people keep their messages in their inbox and every day they look at a very long list and to me that's very overwhelming my workflow is basically sorting all of your messages into three main folders and then leaving the ones that you're going to take action on right now in your inbox the main folders are done to do and to work the done folder is an archive to save anything that you need to save for business purposes or just things that you want to keep a record of to do are things that you want to do or want to read a review but if you don't do anything at the moment or don't actually get to it then it's not really a big deal examples include design references newsletters cool HTML emails that you want to save or anything that you'd like to save and look at but not file away forever inside of your archive or done folder the to work folder is for messages that you need to take action on or do something about but you're not going to do it exactly right now the remaining messages in your inbox or things that you plan on doing right now and it sort of becomes a to-do list that way you can focus on two or three things that you're gonna do on right now monitor all incoming communications and reprioritize anything if any higher priority incoming email comes in I like to use Apple Mail because it has some really easy to use keyboard shortcuts that will help you navigate between folders and also sort your messages into your folders as they come in I'm going to show you how to set up a gmail account with Apple Mail I know Gmail is pretty popular so that way you can take advantage of the easy to use keyboard shortcuts and have a clean inbox and sort everything as needed I'll also show you how to set up filters for special types of emails for example I have a fonts folder and all of my fonts emails go into that particular folder rather than having to move it manually I'll show you how to do that I'll also show you a tip for your work email a lot of the time email aliases are created to send information out to teams but this information is more of an FYI and not for you directly so I'll show you how to create a filter that will prioritize messages that are directly addressed to you and then put all over the email FY eyes into your to work folder which you can review later since they might not be a higher priority than what is directly addressed to you let's get started okay I'm gonna go ahead and open up mail and this is a fresh user account so I'll start from the beginning as you may be as well I'll select to Google open Safari enter my gmail account I'll go ahead and go through the steps and then we should be good to go I'm gonna change some of the visual preferences to how I like it feel free to change out however you want but this makes the sorting a little bit easier in my opinion so the first step is to go to preferences mail preferences viewing and then I like to use classic layout this will put all of your messages on the top and a preview on the bottom I'll go ahead and move the columns to open them up a little bit there we go and then I also like to change the font size I'll just do that because I'm a little OCD fonts and colors I like lucida grande 11 okay so the first step is to create your three folders I'll show you how to do that will create done to do in to work I'll go to mailbox new mailbox and then here where it says location you can either choose to save it on your Mac and it won't be saved on the server or you can choose it to save on your gmail account and it will be saved on the server there are pluses and minuses to both of these if you put stuff in your to work folder and then you're on your phone or on the go it won't save online so if you have a lot of email space which Gmail does putting it online is fine so I'll keep the vocation for my gmail and I'll type done one more time mailbox new mailbox to do and then mailbox new mailbox to work the next step is to drag these folders into the little menu bar next to mailboxes I'll show you I'll put done here right after mailboxes to do right here in the second position and then to work in the third so the reason why I put them up there and in that particular order the keyboard shortcuts to access those folders are based off of the order so if I want to do done which is the first one I'll do command one to do command two and so on and so on I'll show you we'll go to done so command one to do command two to work command three and then my inbox will be command four okay so let's get to sorting the email now most of these were for did for me for test purposes but let's just pretend that they were forwarded directly from the sender so this is a font email and I want to read this but it's not really important if I don't so I'll go ahead and put it in to do using control command to same thing so control command - I'll put this one as well this one I really want to read but I'm not going to do it exactly right now so I put it in to work this is a receipt that I need to file and I need to do this but also not going to do it right now something that I might want to look at and buy so I'll put that in to do because if I don't buy it you know no biggie probably for the better same thing with this film discounts I'll put it in two as well this billing statement I want to look out right now so I'm going to go ahead and leave it inside of the inbox and then these I'll just put in done they're kind of some leftovers so I can keep a record of my subscribers thanks for watching by the way so now my inbox only has something that I need to do right now or a couple things and it's less overwhelming than looking at a huge wall of emails all the time whenever I'm done with this task I'll go ahead and do ctrl command one to put it inside of the done folder I'll do command three to go back to my work folder and then I'll put both of these inside of my inbox using ctrl command four and now I have a small to-do list of things to do but it's not too overwhelming I check my email every 15 minutes I try not to have a badge in the dock that way it doesn't distract me but when I'm ready and I choose to look at my email I have all of the things that I need to do high-priority inside of my inbox and I also keep an eye on things coming in and can change priorities as needed now I have a lot of font emails and so rather than taking time to sort all of those emails into the to-do folder I go ahead and create a fonts folder so if you have a particular thing that you get a lot of you can create a special folder and then put a filter on it that way you'll save some time sorting I'll show you how to do that I'll go to mail preferences click on rules first add rule I'll call this fonts and then I'm going to go ahead and put some of the font emails back in the inbox normally if when you have the email selected that you want to filter clicking the plus sign will automatically put the email address of the sender in the field but since I forwarded these to myself I'm just going to make a couple changes so this one is my fonts I'll just put message content and then another one is t26 so whenever one of these things arrives it'll go ahead and sort it into the fonts folder it went ahead and applied the rule so the one email that matched is now inside of the fonts folder I created the fonts folder by just making a new mailbox I did mail new mailbox and then instead of saving it online I saved it on my Mac I typed fonts and then it appeared now if you get a ton of emails from work what I would recommend and this sounds crazy but you'll have a happier life I swear basically make a rule that says if an email is not addressed directly to you put it in the to work folder it's kind of like someone saying hey everybody and wanting you to listen versus hey insert your name here you can stay on top of things that are most important which are things that are addressed directly to you rather than keeping on top of all the fYI eyes during your busy day I'll show you how to do that now go to mail preferences click on rules we'll add another rule let's say just me and we'll say if it's not to contains your work email address then move the message to to work so anything not addressed to just you it'll go to to work and it's probably going to take an adjustment and you might not like it you can always delete the rule but if you get tons of emails from JIRA or asana or other things like that this will definitely help you can also make a filter just for JIRA or asana but I kind of put it all in one - work folder that way I can stay on top of it and not have to check multiple folders for updates let me know what you think and if you need any help you can always email me at hello at the productivity shop CEO or join the productivity shop slack channel thanks for watching I'll see you later
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