Cleaning Up a Messy E-mail Inbox By Randy Dean, MBA

Alright, hello everyone. Welcome to the first video in today's two-part video series on how to get that inbox a little bit better and under control. This video is going to focus on a quick way to clean up your messy email inbox. And once again, I am Randy Dean, commonly known as the Email Sanity Expert, and I lead anywhere from 75 to 100 sessions on time and tech and email management all around the United States, Canada, and occasionally Europe, uh, every year. And I want to get into this topic because one of the most popular things that I get asked about is, okay, Randy, so you've given me a system on how to better manage your email moving forward. Well, what do I do with everything that's in there? Now, the part 2 video that I am going to create is all about the different folder structures that you could consider in your email in both Outlook and Gmail. I'm going to give you the link to that video below this, uh, message in the comments area so that you can jump to that video because that sort of talks about how do you build and construct the right kind of email folder structures for you. And there's basically 3 different philosophies. That's the other video today. This video is going to be basically about how to clean up an inbox that's already a mess so that you can keep it clean moving forward. And so let's dive in now. I always, when I do this in my programs, I always ask this first question, how big is your mess? Because depending on how many emails you're actually having to deal with, I think that sort of creates two different ways to go about this. Now, I always tell people, if you've got a couple hundred emails or less, honestly, I think the best way to just deal with this is you're going to just go through them on a couple different rounds here and do a few things that will help clean this up quickly. First step I want you to do is this. Go through and file or delete whatever you can just file or delete. My bet is if you've got a couple hundred emails and you just went through those couple hundred emails and you filed the ones that you want to keep but you don't need to take any more actions on, or deleted the ones you no longer need, my bet is about half of those emails are going to go away right there. Um, you know, more or less, a little bit here or there. But let's say you start out with 200, you're going to be down to about 100, and it's going to take you, I don't know, maybe half an hour to an hour to go through them all and get rid of the ones that you just need to file or delete. Then step 2, now what I want you to do is take what's left. So you're already down by half, take what's left and just deal with every email that's in there. That'll take you a couple minutes or less. Now this is going to be the majority of your time. That might take you the next hour or two to go through these emails, open the ones that have something quick you need to do, a quick response, a quick reply, a quick forward, look up a piece of information, forward it on, take a quick little action. I want you to get all of those gone. Deal with the quick little things and get them done, get them moving. Now, here's the thing that's funny. You've got people out there that have been waiting for you to get this stuff done. They're going to be really happy with you a little bit later today because they're going to go, "Finally, he answered my question." So, just get the quick ones done. I want you to clear as many of those out of there as you can. Now, Like I said, we started now with 100, now you're probably down to about 50. And then here's step number 3. Whatever's left, add it to your task list or add it to your calendar. That could be your paper task list, that could be your Outlook or Google task list, that could be the task list on your phone or tablet, or your calendar. Add it to one of those two places. And then once you've identified the task or the calendar item that's inside that email, file that email or delete that email. And so in this 3-step process, my bet is anywhere from a couple hours to up to a half a day, you're taking a couple hundred emails and they're gone. You're going to get this thing down to almost zero, if not all the way to zero. Okay, so that, that's what you do if you got a couple hundred or less. Now, if you've got something way more than 200, I'm going to recommend a slightly different process. First question I want to ask you is, Just, can you delete all emails that are over a certain age? I run into some people and they've got emails that are 5, 10 years old in their inboxes. And my question is, do you have any relevance for that? Do you even have a company policy that might say once emails reach a certain age, they should be summarily deleted? If you've got an electronic retention policy in your firm that says once they reach a certain age, you can just get rid of them, you should follow that policy. It makes it pretty easy. And one of the things that you can do in most inboxes is just simply sort it by age. And then you can go down to the email that is the youngest email meeting the rule. So let's say your company wants you to delete everything that's 2 years old or older. Go down to the email that is exactly 2 years old, click on it, and if you're using Outlook, if you hold down the Shift key after you click on that email and go all the way to the bottom of that mailbox and then click on the very bottom email, that makes one big group. Let me show you what I mean when I talk about this. Let's pop into Microsoft Outlook. And in order for me to do this, I'm going to go into one of my archive files. I'll go into my archive sent folder. And I just want you to see something here. So I'm going to sort it by Received. So it's going to put it in some sort of an order here. And now what I want to do is I'm going to page down and let's see, let's go all the way back to— oh, that, that's good— December 12th. And now what I'm going to do is hold the Shift key and I'm going to page way down here to No, no, this is just a couple months. I'm going to go to here. Good. And click. And I just made a group. And now I could either delete those, or now that I've made a group, I could pick them up and move them to— see, I could actually move them into a different folder. I'm not going to do that, but that's how you make a group based on age. You can also, by the way, since we're talking about this, watch this. You could also sort it by person or by subject. Let's say I want to see all the emails that have 2018 in the subject line. Look what I just did. And now I could make these all a group. See what I just did right there? And now what I could do is— that's another way that I can quickly sort and move stuff. We're going to talk about that little tip more in a minute. But the first question, coming back to what we were talking about, is can you delete them by age? If you can, do it. Now, if you cannot, if you're uncomfortable taking that action and deleting emails over an age, could you make a folder called Really Old Emails? And then instead of deleting those emails, just move them into that folder. And I always tell people, maybe 6 months or older, just move them all. Move everything 6 months or older into a folder called Really Old Emails. Now, let's say you do have a rule, 2 years and older, you just got to get rid of those. Company says they want you to do that. Do that. Then take everything between 6 months old and 2 years old and put them in that folder called Really Old Emails. And I hope you see what I'm doing. I just cut off the feet of your beast. I cut the legs right off. I've taken out a huge chunk of your messages right there. And you did that, if you did it properly, in a couple minutes probably. Now what I want you to do is a little bit counterintuitive. I want you to make a folder called Really New Emails. I actually show this in my programs. So take a look at this. I'm going to go into my folder structure here and inside of here, let me see if I can find it. In my inbox, Really New Emails with an exclamation point. See what I just did right there? And what's sort of nice about that, let me, let me explain to you. This is a little counterintuitive. I want you to take all of the emails from the last couple weeks, and I want you to put those into that folder. And let me explain to you what I'm doing here. So I've already taken out the oldest emails. You've either deleted them or filed the oldest emails. I don't want you spending much time looking through those emails because they're really old. You probably don't need to spend time being very particular and filing each and every one of those. Um, I just don't know if that's good use of your time for productivity. Perspective. The newest emails you have are actually the ones that you need to look at fairly closely. And so that's why I want you to move them out of your inbox for right now so that you can keep them to go through them with a little more specificity. Now, one thing, if you're using Gmail, what you might need to do is mark them and move them into a label. And I would create a label called newest emails because with Gmail, when you do your sorting and putting stuff away automatically, Some of these might get pulled out by the slightly different way that Gmail processes and moves stuff. Okay. So, so I would mark them all in a new label called newest emails, because then what you can do is go into that folder after you do the steps we're talking about here and go through those emails. What you're going to end up doing is going through all these emails one by one, because these are the emails that still have active items, but I want you to get them out of your inbox right now, because now think about what's in your inbox. What you've got in your inbox now are emails, say, between 2 or 3 weeks old and 6 months old. So these are the emails that you've worked on fairly recently, but they're old enough that you probably don't still have a lot of active items in there. And now this is when I want you to use those sorting capabilities that I just showed you. Remember, once again, let's pop back out here. I'm going to go back into here. I can sort by subject line. I can sort by size of attachment. I can sort by date, obviously, to get it in from oldest to newest or newest to oldest. And I can also sort by whoever's in the, in the from field or the to field. And so what this means is that I can create groups. So let's say I want to find all the emails that have video in the subject line. So I just click on that one that says video, and now I can make a group and move them all into a video folder. See what I can do there? And the reason I wanted to show you that is what I want you to do with the emails that are, say, between 3 weeks and 6 months old is I want you to create natural logical groups that you can easily determine that are related to your key projects, clients, activities, events, vendors, and start sorting groups of emails, not one at a time, groups of emails into your folders. So you're not going one by one through hundreds or even thousands of messages. And then once you do that, you're going to have a smattering of leftovers. So sort it by subject, sort it by sender, maybe sort it by date. File as many emails as you can out of that 3-week to 6-month old process into the folders. You're going to have a smattering of leftovers. And now what you're going to do is take all the emails that are new, move them back into your inbox, with the smattering of leftovers that you have right here. And then what's the time for? It's time to do 3-step process again. You take all of those items now, delete or file whatever you can delete or file, handle everything, takes a couple minutes or less, and then whatever's left goes on your task list, your calendar, then you file or delete. Now let me tell you this, this process that we just described— by the way, if I did that too fast, rewind and play this again. And maybe even stop at each step. You know what's funny? I do YouTube videos all the time on home repairs and car repairs, and I'll play it for about 6 seconds, hit pause, and then do what they told me to do, then hit play again. You can do that right here in your inbox. Do this with your inbox. And then what's going to happen is— I actually had this happen once. I was working for one of my university clients. I was doing the session. I described this process. Woman who was in the class on a Tuesday had 3,500 emails in her inbox. She emailed me on Friday and said, "This is my last email." And I promise you, she didn't just do select all, delete. She followed this process and was able to finally get control of this. Especially if you watch the other video, which talks about how you can set up your folder structures. You see how these two sort of mesh together? And then once you get that inbox clean, Once you get that inbox clean, I want you to follow a SMART email regimen so you don't lose control again. And I cover this extensively in my classes. Sort of what I want you to do, you get a new email, you're going to open it and decide what you need to do with it the very first time you open it. Then if it's quick, you're going to get it done. If it's not quick, it goes onto your task list or maybe your calendar. Once it's done or tasked, you file or delete. And if there's no place to file it, you make a folder and you put it there. This is not rocket science. And I'm going to give you links to a couple other YouTube videos I previously created which show you very quickly and easily how to potentially, you know, turn your emails in Outlook to Tasker calendar items or your emails in Gmail to Google Tasks or Google Calendar items very quickly, very efficiently. So look for that in the comments below as well as the link to the other video that talks all about folder structures. And if you put all this together, it could really change the way you manage this stuff and help you get your mess under control and then keep it from getting messy again. Now, once again, my name is Randall Dean. Thank you for your time. If you'd like to find out about more about me and my programs, please go check out my website, randalldean.com. You can actually see a little demo video of when I'm up speaking on stage on the front page of that site. And there's a link through to, you know, descriptions of the different programs I do at conferences and events. There's also a link through to some of my online full-length streaming webinar replays that you can actually purchase for a fee. Also, if you enjoyed this video and the other videos that I'm creating, I do strongly recommend you subscribe to the channel. And if you'd like to get a whole series of little 2 to 4 page PDF productivity tip sheets in electronic email format, just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and by automated email— imagine that— I will send you out a whole series of little bonus tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, smartphone/tablet usage, how to be more productive, less distracted. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for your time. Hope that you learned something here today that might help you get your mess under control. And, um, good luck with your productivity. Thanks.