Tweet

Three Tips for Cleaning Out Your Overflowing Inbox

Guest post by: Terri Zwierzynski

Article Overview: If you are like me, your inbox is full of emails you intend to read “someday”. Newsletters are a particularly insidious culprit; full of info-packed articles, tips and resources, we often save them to read later, only to find ourselves accumulating more and more email, and never finding the time to sit down to that task.

Three Tips for Cleaning Out Your Overflowing Inbox

If you are like me, your inbox is full of emails you intend to read “someday”. Newsletters are a particularly insidious culprit; full of info-packed articles, tips and resources, we often save them to read later, only to find ourselves accumulating more and more email, and never finding the time to sit down to that task.

Why do we keep them? Because we believe that possibly, somewhere in there lies the magic answer to some problem we’ve been experiencing. And then we feel guilty every time we open our email, because we haven’t gotten around to reading that vitally important information that might change our business or our life for the better.

And so our inbox is overflowing with:

•    articles with info that we think we need to learn

•    links to products or services we might need to buy

•    ebooks we think we need to read

I’m here to tell you that you don’t need any of those emails. In fact, you need to delete them — and you’ll move your business ahead much faster as a result.

Three tips for cleaning out your inbox:

1. Let go of your need to hold onto this information. I can hear you moaning now: “but maybe I’ll never find this info again!” Trust me…i f it’s an important concept, someone will write about it again, and it’ll end up in your inbox (or your Twitter stream, or your Facebook news, or a blog you follow) again. If it doesn’t -- it wasn’t really that important.

If it’s a great, not-to-be-missed product or service, you’ll find it again, because people will keep talking about it! If you don’t hear about it again…it was probably a ho-hummer anyway.

So be brave, and hit that delete key with confidence that if it’s really important, it will show up on your radar again, just when you need it!

2. Look at all the newsletters you have accumulated...and unsubscribe from AT LEAST half of them. Then delete all the back issues, too. We sign up for newsletters for all kinds of perfectly good reasons -- but with the plethora of really great information out there, it’s easy to get carried away.

The bottom line is you don’t need most of this information...you already have 90% of the info you need to run your business. You know what to do...searching for more information is just another way to procrastinate, give in to the fear that you don’t know what you are doing, etc. Trust that you are ready...and get busy implementing, not researching more!

3. Devise a system to read or discard email immediately. Spend just a few seconds deciding whether something is worth reading right away -- and if it is not, delete it! If you plan to read it, do it right then. Alternatively, put the “read soon” emails into a separate folder and then put time on your calendar every Friday to clean out that folder -- read and delete so the folder is EMPTY at the end of your Friday session. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment you’ll have when you’ve done your “research” for the week!

Even better — with a cleaner inbox, you’ll find you have more room to get things done…because you won’t be constantly looking at an inbox full of things to read!

Related Articles
  How to get control over your email
  Green Cleaning Means More Than Clean
  How to Manage Your Email & Inbox – Lessons 6-10
  How to Manage Your Email & Inbox – Lessons 21-25
  Improve E-mail: Avoid the Quicksand
  Home-based Business Idea: Upholstery Cleaning
  Home-based Business: Cleaning Services
  Sales Appointments to Sell Free Services
  Top quality Email Marketing Software features
  One Great Way to Increase Email Productivity and Social Networking Connectivity
  Three Fastest-Growing Franchise Industries Right Now
  Great Ideas For Home-based Business
  Home-based Business Idea: Mobile Dry Cleaning/Laundry Service
  Your Internet Home Business will Earn Extra Income with These Email Newsletter Tips
  Too Much or Not Enough: How to Eliminate the 5 Biggest Time Wasters in Your Day
  How To Work At Home With A Computer Taking Surveys
  The Wrong Things
  Marking time or making time?
  Email: The overloaded inbox
  How to Start a Cleaning Business - 8 Steps

Article Tags: amp nbsp, blog, culprit, email, important information, inbox, magic answer, rsquo, span style, style font



Related Forum Posts
Help me name my moms business - I think Infinity Cleaning Services sounds better than Elite Cleaning Solutions... Why the Solutions? What is there to be solved? You simply get a rag with some Windex on it and wipe away.... plug the vacuum and Vac Away, get a mop and mop away. Stick to Infinity Cleaning Services... ICS sounds cool...
Help me name my moms business - My Mom is a dynamic entrepreneur and running several businesses. Recently she started a commercial cleaning business. I have thought of some name for my mom's cleaning business, but would like some other suggestions. I have narrowed it down to, either: Infinity Cleaning Services, or Elite Cleaning Solutions. She is located in South Florida, and many of the other names are taken. Thanks,
Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
Re: I got a pop up! - [quote="ChrisH":31c1e714] About the logo - the first thing I would change would be to take out the "C" and use the broom for the letter C. Chris[/quote:31c1e714] Funny. In my mind I had the broom replacing the "l" in Cleaning. But now that I look, of course you're right, the broom should replace the "C."
Don't they know there are spammers out there? - Just a rant.... I have a spam filter on my email, such that every day probably about 20 or more emails a day end up in my Bulk folder and I don't even see them. But I still see dozens of spam messages a day in my Inbox, and I recognize them by their titles, if they just say, "Hello," or "Hi" or some other generic title, I know it's spam and I just delete it without even opening it - as you must do. Today I got an email from someone, and the title was "wff". Just that. Not even capital letters. Normally I would have just deleted it without reading it, but fortunately I saw the name of the author, and it was a name I recognized, not a friend but an acquaintance - someone who works for the Williamsburg Film Festival. And the title "wff" was of course Williamsburg Film Festival. And I wonder how many businesses send out emails to potential customers with generic subject lines so that their stuff gets sent to the Trash file without even being looked at.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Are You My Mentor

How To Be Happy at Work? Acknowledge Yourself

How To Become A Member of the Paparazzi

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.