Emails can be a struggle with all that information every day. It is important to know the difference between what emails are important and what emails can wait for you to read and reply if needed. This article will help you to find a way how you can best protect yourself from unwanted emails and be better at organizing your day-to-day email reading.
Did you know that every year 87 billion emails are sent around the world?
The good news is that they don’t all arrive in your inbox, but you probably get a lot of emails you don’t want, and you may wonder how to protect yourself from them. It is possible, provided that you adopt rigorous management of your messages, assuming that your inbox is a sanctuary that you intend to respect. The first tip to protect yourself? Apply the automatic filters that every self-respecting inbox has. These filters allow you to automatically classify these messages in dedicated folders, or to give them a label. This allows you to sort emails that don’t need to be read immediately, such as those sent to you by family and friends, and that contain videos or links to different sites. The filter will allow you to put them in a “Miscellaneous” folder, for example, without any further intervention on your part, so that you can consult them later. If you don’t want your inbox to be flooded with unimportant messages, think about unsubscribing from newsletters that no longer interest you, and putting the others in a specific folder, to be consulted as you wish.
Get organized!
Once you have taken these precautions, you can still apply a few effective rules:
- If you don’t want to become a slave to your e-mail, prefer to process messages in batches rather than one by one, as they come in. Not all e-mails are urgent, far from it, and you are under no obligation to answer them in the second…
- On the other hand, don’t hesitate too long before processing them if you don’t want your inbox to start looking like an attic in which forgotten objects are piled up and no longer useful.
- If you appreciate respect for your mailbox, remember to respect the mailboxes of your family and friends. Taking advantage of a sleepless night to send friendly hellos to each other is charming… but it can be very annoying for recipients who see their emails arrive on their smartphones. If the phone is lying on the bedside table and is not set to silent, you can be woken up in the middle of the night. It’s worth thinking about this before you start a diplomatic incident!
