Organization Tips

Take control of your inbox with these simple e-mail organization tips

I’m going to let you in on a little secret of how I keep my world in order.

Google.

Google products, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar, are essential for keeping myself and my family organized.

While e-mail organization might not be the sexiest of topics, it’s key to keeping your personal life and/or business organized. (And freeing up space for your favorite creative outlets.)

It’s is my main mode of communicating with customers, planning fundraisers and volunteer work, and making plans with friends. Therefore, it’s key that I keep on top of it organized it. (Especially since I have limited time to look at it with two young kiddos.)

I’ll admit, there are days where I feel completely overwhelmed by my inbox.

But for the most part, I have a pretty good handle on my e-mail and keeping it to Inbox Zero most days.

Learn how to tackle and organize your Google inbox with two Great Features: labels and filters.

Just a heads up, for your convenience, this post contains affiliate links. You can read my disclosure here.

All of my e-mail, including my personal and business e-mail, go to one inbox.

While on the one hand, it’s really convenient because it means I only have to lot into one place to check it, it can also be a little overwhelming sometimes. Every day I’m inundated with more e-mails than I could possibly go through.

To make it more manageable I have systems in place for my Gmail using labels and filters to help me keep it organized. I’m also a visual person. I like creating labels with different color tags for different e-mails and projects so I can easily scan my e-mail.

For example, if anyone sends me an e-mail to my business e-mail address Gmail,l automatically labels it Linkouture and puts a handy purple tag in front of it.

To set up labels, click on the gear below your name and click on “Settings”

Click on the second tab, “Labels,” and scroll down to the third bolded category where it says “Labels”.

Scroll down to the Labels section. Click on “Create new label” and create categories for things that make sense to you. For example, when my husband and I were planning our wedding I created a label for anything wedding related and when we moved I had one labeled “Moving”.

Once your labels are set up, you can easily label your messages by clicking on the box to the left of your e-mail message. When you do that, a little tag icon will appear and you can choose a label for it.

You can also easily create new labels here and add more than one label to a message. You can use labels for each of your children, different projects you are working on, events you are planning, upcoming trips — anything that makes sense for you and will help you to organize your e-mails.

UPDATE: As of August 2019 I have added a few new labels that I learned about since taking an amazing organizational class called Learn De Become. These are @immediate action, @weekly review, and @to read. When I check my e-mail periodically throughout the day, anything that needs to be responded to within a day or two goes to @immediate action. Anything that needs to be done that week goes to @weekly review. And anything that I’d like to read but isn’t urgent goes to @to read.

Once something is labeled you can Archive it so it is no longer in your main e-mail inbox. You can access all the messages with that label (and access archived messages) by hovering your mouse all the way on the left where it says “Inbox”. All of your labels will show up as different categories. You can click on it to access to see just the e-mails with that label instead of scrolling through your entire inbox trying to find an e-mail about a specific topic.

Another great feature is Filters.

Gmail Filters allow you to choose e-mails with a certain subject line, that contain a specific keyword, that is sent to a specific e-mail or are sent from a certain e-mail filter into one of these labeled categories instead of going right to your inbox.

This is really handy for things like listservs that tend to send a ton of e-mails each day and would otherwise clog up your main inbox. It’s also a great tool if you have multiple e-mail addresses forwarded to one e-mail address but you want to keep them separate.

To set up filters, click on the gear icon like you did to set up your labels and click on “Settings”. Click on “Filters and Blocked Addresses” and click on “Create New Filter” at the bottom.

When that screen pops up, decide on what type of filter you want. Do you want it to be from a certain e-mail address? Containing a certain word or group of words? Once you have decided and filled out what type of filter you want, click on “Create filter”.

On the next screen, you can choose to have it automatically labeled, skip to a different inbox, etc.

If you found this helpful, here are some other blog posts to read on organization, which is totally my jam:

This post first appeared on A Dish of Daily Life.