The complete guide to clearing your inbox

Guess what I did on Sunday afternoon? I cleaned out my inbox!! And guess what it looks like now? There is NO new mail at all, and it really is very refreshing. Also, if you look at the image above, in the bottom left corner, it only has used 5% of the available space. That is cutting in half what it was before.

Why

Why should you clean out your email?

1. You don’t actually need a lot of the emails that you have in your inbox.

2. It’s really refreshing to have a clear inbox.

3. You can download old images and actually use them instead of just keeping them in your archives.

The process

This isn’t specifically how you do it, but it is how I did it.

1. Clear out old folders.

I used to store all of the blog posts from blogs I was subscribed to in folders. That wasn’t really the best idea. I never went back to look at them, and if I did, then it wasn’t by going to the folder- it was by going to the blog! I started by deleting these. If I did find something that was important to me (something that another person didn’t have a backup of, that I had gone back to look at multiple times in the last 6 weeks, or something that I knew I would need  in the future, I moved it into a new set of folders titled Important and divided into a subset of 5 folders: Blog, Family, Passwords, Photos, School. 

2. Clear Spam, Trash, and Promotions.

Unless it is actually something that shouldn’t be in these categories, most of the items in these folders can be completely deleted.

3.  Start throwing away unimportant items from your main inbox.

In this step, don’t begin to deal with sentimental items, items you’re not sure about, or items you know you want to keep. This step is for deleting stuff you know you don’t want, so it should be pretty easy. I actually cut the number of emails in my inbox in half by doing this (from 1000 to 500).

4. Items you’re not sure about.

This is when you can start thinking. If you haven’t looked at it in the last 6 weeks and don’t plan to in the next 6 weeks, then you probably don’t need it. However, this method isn’t right all the time, so you do decide to keep it, then categorize it into folders you’ve created. (If you haven’t done that yet, then do that now.)

5. Sentimental.

You can go through and read those old emails now. I had a bunch of totally embarrassing emails from when I was 7 that I thought would be really hard to delete. I ended up deleting them all; when would I need emails telling random people that Grandma was going to buy marshmallows? However, this may be harder for you, so if it’s really that hard, you can make a folder (I do stress, though, don’t put them in your important folders. Instead, make a folder titled ‘Sentimental’ so that you don’t mix them up with other, important, emails.

6. Review.

Is your inbox empty yet? If it’s not, complete the other steps again (Step 4 is probably most helpful), and when you are done, then it should be empty.

When my main inbox was empty, I went through my folders and narrowed them down even more. I downloaded all the pictures from the ‘photos’ category and deleted the original emails. I made sure I didn’t need old school emails and checked to make sure I had the backup of each thing. I checked old passwords to make sure they worked and made sure to delete those emails fully.

By now, your inbox is probably empty, and you are probably feeling really refreshed. For me, this only took probably an hour and 15 minutes total (45 minutes for steps 1-5 on Sunday and 30 minutes for step 6 on Monday), so it actually doesn’t take as long as you expect.

 

I know this was short, but I hope you enjoyed and that this was helpful!

Bye till next Friday,

Did you clean out your inbox? Talk to me in the comments 👇👇

 

 

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