Cleaning Up Your Inbox
Welcome, Un-F**k Your Life participants! I thought I’d write out some more detailed instructions to help you sort out your social media (mostly your emails, because seriously!).
My instructions are going to be for gmail users, since that’s what I also use, but I’m sure the steps are pretty similar among most inboxes so you shouldn’t have too much trouble following along!
Creating Filters & Labels
Creating these allows you to sort your inbox into things you need to keep separate, or keep an eye on, and it’s a very useful way of organising your emails, a little like putting them into separate folders or boxes.
You’re going to head into your settings on your emails and in gmail, you’ll need to head to ‘advanced settings’.
Along the top row there, you’ll see an option called filters and blocked addresses.
You want to click where it says ‘create a new filter’.
You can also create a filter using the search bar at the top of your inbox, by clicking on the little drop-down arrow on the right-side of the search bar and filling in the information and clicking ‘create filter’ instead of ‘search’ at the bottom.
A third way you can create a filter is by clicking on an email that you want to apply a filter to: maybe you want to collect all newsletters you’ve subscribed to so you can look at them in your own time.
Perhaps you need to keep emails from a lawyer or a doctor in one place so you don’t lose them.
Whatever the reason, simply click on an email that will go into that filter, and click the three little dots on the top of the screen and select ‘filter messages like these’.
This will take all emails from that particular address and collate them for you. Now, you can select ‘create filter’ which will bring up a number of different options for what will happen to emails from this address.
I would recommend telling it to ‘skip the inbox’ so that it immediately goes somewhere else instead of clogging up your inbox, but you can do all sorts of things like instructing your inbox to mark these emails with a star, or mark them as read immediately. Whatever works best for you!
If you do want these messages to be gathered somewhere else other than your inbox, you can ‘create a label’ for these messages by selecting ‘apply the label’ and making one for these messages, like ‘documents’ or ‘newsletters’ or ‘client correspondence’ whatever you need.
This will create a separate folder to the side of your inbox where all of these messages will be stored.
Now, before you finalise your filter, you’ll see an option right at the bottom of this list to ‘apply this filter to matching conversations’ which you should definitely select so that this filter works retrospectively on your inbox and begins the tidying process.
Some other filters that might be of help to you is maybe keeping order confirmations for online purchases, monthly bill updates from various suppliers, or to help keep track of comments and tractions you might be receiving on a website, page or a channel of yours.
You can also, of course, use filters to block certain email addresses, but that’s your business!
The options really are endless, so take some time to work out what filters are going to work for you, and make a note of them in your workbook for you to work out in a bit.
Using Labels
Another way to sort your messages is to simply apply labels to them. I find this particularly useful in keeping track of work emails especially, or on-going conversation threads that might span weeks or even months.
The labels I tend to use for my work emails as an example are “Action Required”, “Waiting for Response” and “Complete”. Top tip, I actually put an asterisk at the beginning of these titles so that they show right at the top of my list of filters down the left-hand side of my inbox.
Now for these labels, I apply coloured tabs to them. Green for Action, Yellow for Waiting and Red for Complete.
So to create a label, we’re going to do the same thing as we did with the filters, except instead of selecting ‘skip inbox’, we’re simply going to select ‘apply label’ on our options.
So once you’ve got your labels sorted, they will appear to the left of your inbox.
To make them different colours so that they stand out in your inbox, simply click the three little dots next to the label name, and select ‘label colour’. That’s a field day right there, let me tell you!
So, there may be a set address you want to apply these labels to, or if you have a lot of different messages from different accounts to keep track of, you can always simply manually apply these labels yourself.
To do this, simply click the message you want to mark, and on the top menu there, you’ll see the little label icon. If you click that, you can select the label you want to apply to that message in particular.
Doing it this way will also store those emails under those labels or filters on the left hand side. So if you want to just look at the emails you need to action, simply click on the ‘action required’ label to see them all listed there away from the rest of your inbox.
Honestly, they don’t teach this in schools, at least they didn’t when I went, but they really should, right?!
Once you’ve then sorted the emails you want to keep, and worked out what to do with the ones you want to keep in your inbox to work on, you might be left with a bunch that you don’t know what to do with.
There’s obviously a number of options for what you can do with these, but I would honestly recommend deleting them.
Not only are you carrying these emails around for no reason, and allowing them to clog up your inbox when they are serving you absolutely no purpose, our email inboxes actually have quite a large carbon footprint!
So if anything, tidying your inbox is actually helping towards saving the planet, which is an awesome thing.
Inbox Organisation Tools
I’m going to walk you through an application I use all the time with my team. It’s a google chrome extension, so if you don’t use Chrome, either begin to do so, or have a look at some other alternative services.
For now though, I will take you through what Cloud HQ is and what it can do for you.
It’s essentially a collection of productivity tools to help you get more out of your emails.
I use things such as their backup feature, tabs, email trackers, but there’s a whole treasure trove of things in there that you can download.
Simply search Cloud HQ to get started and see what you think. This isn’t an absolutely necessary step for today, but it might help with an inbox at work if you have to send a lot of emails on the daily. Have a look and see what you think.
They have a lot of helpful video tutorials for you to watch too, so I’ll get you make your own mind up about using that!
Password Security
Next: one of the most frustrating things about using the internet is keeping track of all our passwords, right? Everything requires a password, and it’s hard to remember all the ones we set.
I use this great piece of software called Last Pass. This one works on pretty much every browser, so if you’re using something that isn’t chrome, firefox, edge, safari or opera, what are you using?
Now, the free version of Last Pass is pretty sound honestly, but if you want some of the premium features, that is $3 a month, which is billed annually, so $36 a year.
Essentially the way this piece of software works is that you just have to remember one password, the password to your last pass account, which will keep all of your passwords completely safe and secure.
This is available on both web browsers and as an app for mobile devices.
Search Last Pass online to see if this piece of software is a good fit for you, but I see no reason why it wouldn’t be, honestly!
If it sounds like it might be a match for you, maybe make a note to gather your passwords to put into Last Pass, and if you don’t remember your passwords, make new ones to put into your last pass account to keep them safe for forever.
You’re welcome!
Parting Advice
And, finally, if you’re someone who spends a lot of time on social media, whether for professional or social reasons, I invite you to take this time to look over your profiles and have a big old sort!
Maybe there are some people there who you haven’t spoken to in ten or more years, who you can probably stand to unfriend.
Perhaps there’s some exes lurking in there, or people you can’t even remember meeting. There isn’t much point in them being able to access you over the internet, right?
How are your privacy settings? Are they where you’d like them to be? How much information can people who aren’t your friends see about you?
And if you use your social media for business reasons, is all the information up to date? How searchable are you?
I know that today has been a big undertaking, but you can revisit your list you made at the beginning of this session, and see if there is anything you can get done today. Maybe today, you add all your passwords into Last Pass, maybe you decide to sort your emails today, or maybe delete a bunch of old ones. I once reached 20,000 in my inbox, some of them 15 years old!
This extra weight is something you might not even realise you’re carrying around until you’ve gotten rid of it. You’ll thank yourself, seriously.
Well done for today, and I’ll see you next time!