How to declutter your inbox

Taha Zaidi shares tips to organise the black hole that your email has become and boost work productivity

Let’s admit it. We have more emails in our inbox than we need or would ever open. Let’s also agree that we all dream of an inbox that’s just 10 emails long and neatly labelled. In this weekend guide, Taha Zaidi tells you how to Marie Kondo your way to a tiny inbox.

A social entrepreneur and technologist, Taha recently held an online workshop on the systematic approach to decluttering an inbox. More people had signed up for the session than he expected, and by the end of it, they had cleared their unread emails by 94%.

Participants ranged from 19 to 46 years but their queries were common — How to keep track of important emails, how to find an email from two years ago, how to reclaim their inbox from spam, how to not get overwhelmed by the number of unread emails, and how to segregate work emails.

Taha, who’s based in Bengaluru, answers some of these questions.

Cleaning up unread emails is overwhelming. How should one begin?

*Respond to anything that requires less than two minutes immediately.
*Put emails that don’t require immediate action on the to-do list.
*Wherever needed, call up instead of going back-and-forth on an email thread.
*Delete anything that is no longer relevant or needed.
*Create folders to organise your emails, such as ‘social media’, ‘calendar invites’, ‘promotions’.
*Install unroll.me. The service unsubscribes you from newsletters you no longer use or use rarely.

What kind of emails should one delete first?

Any content you haven’t opened in four weeks. These are mostly promotions, newsletters, and subscriptions.

How often should one delete emails?

Once a month is good enough. For people who get more than 20 emails a day, weekly clean-up works well.

How many emails are too many?

It doesn’t matter as long as they are organised and easily accessible. Your goal should be to organise your inbox in such a way that you can find any email in under a minute.

What if we delete an email and regret it later?

Almost everything is accessible on the Internet now. The fear of deleting emails sometimes stems from the ‘Fear of Missing Out’ and also the tendency to hoard data. So it’s important to learn to differentiate necessities from wants.

Should one download emails with services like Thunderbird instead?

No. It’s much easier to store data on the cloud. You can add two-step verification to secure the data. Alternatively, you can store some of these important emails on an encrypted hard disk.

A pro tip.

Don’t try to do everything at once. Cultivate the habit of decluttering your inbox, little by little.

Why do we struggle to tidy our inbox?

“People struggle with decluttering in general and our inbox is not an exception,” shares Taha, who is also the co-founder of a mental health startup in Bengaluru.

Then, there’s the problem of data privacy. “We sign up on services for one-time use but they keep sending emails for life until we unsubscribe. Worse, they pass on our email IDs to other companies, who send us emails we don’t want,” he explains.

How do full inboxes affect work?

“They may not imply cluttered lives but they are a definite cause of distress,” says Taha, referring to those times when important emails don’t reach your inbox because it’s full.

The bane of over-checking emails

According to a McKinsey analysis, an average employee spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails. That’s 2.6 hours a day. Another study by Zarvana says over-checking email wastes 21 minutes per day. Research says that people take up to 15 seconds to 23 minutes to recover from a break taken to check emails.