Sometime ago I began to deal with the cluttered digital world that I was inhabiting and make some changes. One of the big areas of life for me, and I guess many of you is handling email. Emails from multiple accounts would come in, dozens a day not including spam and some would sit in my inbox until they became obsolete. I was often overwhelmed by the daily intake of emails. Email, instead of being a tool of productivity was effectively killing it (or at least any positive energy I had to tackle my day).

Something had to change and moving country gave me an opportunity to begin that process. One big switch was the change from Thunderbird (which served me fine) to Gmail. This was for a few reasons. Firstly I would be without a computer for a while and this made it easier for me to get access to my emails anywhere. Secondly, it was just one less programme to install and run, everything works from within the browser. Thirdly, Google own my life already so another Google programme wasn’t really a problem.

The next change was how I organised email. I used to have a complicated directory of folders both in windows explorer and in my email programme. That was a mistake. Instead of things being easy to file and find things, it took longer. Was it in explorer or in email? Which folder was it put in? It just wasn’t working for me and the weight of the structure began to overwhelm my ability to remember where I put it.

Now, I just have three folders. Inbox, pending, bin. That’s it. From regularly having over 100 emails in my inbox, I now have no more than 30 (27 today) and usually under twenty as I try to keep on top of it. An email comes in, I respond and then I press delete. If there’s ongoing actions needed (such as in our house sale) but I’m waiting on others to do their bit then it goes into ‘pending.’ Once it’s done, it’s binned. If I need to file something I send it to Evernote. If I need to find something, well as you’d expect Gmail has an excellent search engine.

This new system hasn’t had the same load on it as I’m not as busy but I’m much happier with this, feel more in control and it’s much, much simpler to manage and that, after all, was the point.

So how do you manage email?