How To Organize Email: Effective Management Tips To Boost Productivity

Team Polymail

If your email mailbox is an ever-expansive jungle of unread messages, spam, and important work information mixed in with social content, your productivity will inevitably take a toll. Maintaining a clean and organized collection mailbox takes some discipline and planning. Like most things, once you achieve a routine, stick with it and you will be successful.

How Can Polymail Help?

Polymail simplifies even the most complex webs of information, providing an email designed for productive professionals. It was designed for individuals passionate about high-impact work and staying on top of important conversations.

Polymail supports every major email provider, including Gmail and Outlook, connecting every facet of your world in seconds. Advanced integration allows for other messaging apps like Slack to connect as well. Schedule messages, reorganize your inbox, track emails, and more. 

Message templates enable you to quickly format your messages for any possible recipient. This feature is great for maintaining a productive rapport with clients and staying on top of team-based work. A plethora of supported keyboard shortcuts enhance your potential efficiency and enable other components of Polymail to work faster.

We will share with you several tips on how to effectively organize your email, manage future messaging, and boost your productivity with Polymail.

Cleanse Your Mailbox

Without constant attention, your mailbox will quickly become saturated with junk. There are a few ways to restore your inbox to its former glory and start good maintenance habits.

One of the fastest ways to improve your current organization is to delete anything that is no longer relevant. This process takes time, but is well worth it. 

Through Polymail’s Command Center (activated by the shortcut Command/Ctrl + J), almost every navigational action is accessible. With a few clicks and an expansive list of keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly cut through the clutter and move old emails to the trash folder (press delete).

While purging old emails, it’s important to mark every message from an unimportant source as spam. This will prevent any businesses or organizations that have your email address on a list from continuing to send you unwanted messages. If they are newsletters, blog updates, sale promotions, or other content sources that you signed up for, toggling unsubscribe (Command/Ctrl + U) will cease further updates.

A helpful tool you may want to consider for decluttering is Unsubscriber, which identifies all of your subscriptions and helps you unsubscribe to help clean your inbox in just a few minutes! You’ll be able to see a list of what you’re subscribed to, and you can remove yourself from email lists in just one click. You can take back your email inbox risk-free here!

If you aren’t ready to dispose of cluttering emails yet, you always have the option to archive (E) them. This moves these emails to the archive folder, separate from your main inbox. Archiving is a helpful tool in unclogging a messy inbox.

Use Folders, Labels, And Filters

Moving non-urgent emails to the archive and trash folders is a great first step, but doesn’t yield great results on its own. Further organizing your inbox is a necessary step that will save you time in the long run.

Folders generally include the four large categories of Inbox, Archive, Spam, and Trash, but there is no limit to the number of folders and subfolders one can create.

These smaller folders within an inbox are called labels in Polymail. Labels take your degree of organization to the next level. They are helpful for documenting conversations within certain groups or teams.

An email can be added to a label instantly by pressing the hotkey L or by activating the Command Center and typing in the word label. Its icon resembles a gray tag. By using the shortcut or by clicking the symbol any message thread can then be added to that label, which becomes increasingly helpful over time.

Filters are an ingenious method to automate labels. When you set up a filter, emails automatically get filed away into their designated label. You can do this by email address or by using certain keywords that are bound to be prevalent in either the subject or body of a future email.

Employ The FAST System

Organization is a daily responsibility. The F.A.S.T. system guides you on how to proceed after you read a new message. Do you:

  • File it away. Save the email for a later time by archiving the message or sending it to a different label.
  • Assign it to someone. Can someone else assist you or take on the responsibility of this message? If so, forward the email and clear it from your inbox.
  • Store or scan it. For really important emails that need to remain visible for the week, it’s always helpful to mark it as unread (Command/Ctrl + D) or even to signify its significance with a star (Command/Ctrl + Shift + L).
  • Trash it. If you don’t need it, throw it away. Move it to the trash folder or mark it as spam.

Within moments of reading an email, you can have it sent away from your inbox where it can be most effective. A productive habit to develop includes maintaining an email mailbox’s organization twice a day: once in the morning as the first order of business, and once at the end of your work day.

Separate Business From Pleasure

To keep your email more organized and to minimize unwanted messages, simply make another email!

Polymail allows you to connect all of your email addresses for integrated communication. Any subscriptions, trials, or social media accounts you sign up for should be made with your casual email. Reserving only work-related content for your work email will make the maintenance job far less demanding.

Utilize Templates

Polymail also has custom email template options to further expedite communication. If you have to respond to clients or within groups in the same format each time, utilizing these templates can save you a lot of time.

Polymail Basic, Premium, and Enterprise subscriptions come with Message Templates that allow you to write an email once, save it, and send it again to different recipients whenever you’d like, making any small adjustments or customizations you need to with placeholders.

All you have to do to get started is click on the Templates tab in the main sidebar. Then press the blue " + Create New Template" button and start composing.

Placeholder fields made with brackets like these {} can include changing variables like names, dates, and figures. After you’ve saved a template, it can be opened easily when composing a draft. The icon resembles a document, and when clicked you can select any saved template to insert into your current email draft.

Clicking the tab button on your keyboard once your template has loaded will move you from placeholder to placeholder, automatically highlighting the contents and allowing easy and quick completion.

Conclusion

Polymail is a great way to optimize your organization and boost productivity. Mailbox maintenance requires discipline and regular attention, but is a lot easier with the top-tier automation of Polymail. Shortcuts to quickly move email threads into labels, set up filters, mark as unread or very important, delete, or archive all contribute to rapid filing. Restoring a zero-message inbox is within your reach!

Want to save 4 hours a week on your email? Try email designed for professionals and power up your conversations with intelligent automation. Polymail supports all major email providers including Google, Microsoft, iCloud, and custom IMAP.

Get access to Email Tracking, Send Later, Message Templates, Scheduling Pages, and more!

Connect any of your email accounts in seconds.

Try Polymail today risk free!

Sources:

https://www.self.com/story/email-management-tips 

https://www.inc.com/rhett-power/is-your-inbox-out-of-control-9-steps-to-organize-y.html 

https://divingbellcreative.com/custom-built-email-templates/

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