Celebrate National Clean Out Your Inbox Week with These Tips

Most of our communications are happening online today. Play it safe when removing messages you’re unsure what to do with. 

Now that we’ve settled back in to work from the holiday season and vacation time, most of us are working on checking things off of our New Year Resolutions lists. Topping the list for most is the plan to stay organized and focused this year. If you’ve been focusing on de-cluttering and clearing space in 2019, then you probably came back to the office to an inbox overflowing with e-mails, spam and lots of to-do items you likely red-flagged.

Now that we’ve settled back in to work from the holiday season and vacation time, most of us are working on checking things off of our New Year Resolutions lists. Topping the list for most is the plan to stay organized and focus this year. If you’ve been focusing on decluttering and clearing space in 2019, then you probably came back to the office to an inbox overflowing with emails, spam and lots of to-do items you likely red flagged. 

When it comes to a neat and organized office, it’s not just about the papers cluttering your desk, today we’re more digital than ever and most of our communications are happening online. 

If you haven’t taken the time to clean and sort out your inbox today’s the day! In honor of National Clean Out Your Inbox Week, we’re offering you top tips to finally getting the number of unread messages down while playing it safe with removing messages that you’re unsure what to do with.

Create Folders and Get Organized

This part of the process will take a little more time. But we promise it’s going to get you set-up for a smooth and easy transition into organization going forward. Create folders based on topics most of your e-mails fall into (client names, tasks, etc.) Set-up rules to automatically populate folders with those new incoming messages so they always go where they should be (you’ll need to remember to check them for new messages) or simply move e-mails into their appropriate folders once you’ve opened them. This makes searching for items and sorting them much easier.

Sort & Delete

After you’ve moved important e-mails over into their appropriate folders, your inbox will probably still look messy. Especially if you’re subscribed to lots of newsletters or have your e-mail address available online. Spam simply pours in sometimes. An easy way to clean these up is to sort the inbox by the sender and start holding down the delete button on those items you know you no longer need. Or, if you’re confident enough in what remains and don’t want to visually re-check it you could Select + All and delete. While you’re at it you may want to also unsubscribe from lists that are no longer relevant to you.

Playing it Safe

If you’re really concerned about the increasing space limitations in your inbox and you know there are secure and confidential items included in these files, you may want to look into a professional document destruction company – one that offers hard drive destruction services and can guarantee your information will not get into the wrong hands.

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National Clean Out Your Inbox Week

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