How to organize emails: 9 strategies to keep your inbox tidy

With emails flooding in faster than they can be addressed, managing an inbox can quickly become a source of overwhelm. This constant inflow of messages often leads to missed information, wasted time, and a persistent sense of digital clutter.

Fortunately, there are many effective email inbox organization strategies that can transform inbox chaos into an organized asset that keeps you in control of your personal and professional life. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to organize emails using nine clear and actionable strategies. These techniques will reduce inbox clutter and help you reclaim valuable time and focus. We’ll also explore a modern solution to help automate this process for a more efficient and stress-free workflow.

Mastering email organization helps you take control of your inbox, ensuring you can quickly prioritize crucial messages, remove distracting emails, and neatly store the rest. Implementing even a few email organization strategies offers the following advantages:

• Improves workflow: Organizing your email and reducing clutter helps you navigate your inbox quickly, improving overall productivity and efficiency. It also makes it easier to tailor your inbox to meet your specialized needs.

• Speeds up message response times: Structured systems like automated sorting and prioritization allow you to handle your emails more promptly, enabling you to maintain professional relationships through quicker response times.

• Lowers stress levels: A cluttered inbox can be a source of constant mental stress. Organizing your inbox helps reduce mental overload, allowing you to focus on priority tasks without stressing about unattended email backlogs.

• Improves collaborations: A streamlined email inbox helps you stay updated on critical communications and take prompt action where necessary. It also helps you spot potential issues immediately and address them before they escalate.

• Helps reclaim lost time: A well-organized inbox helps you save time by making it easier to review, reply to, and even search for emails. It simplifies your digital life, allowing you more time to tackle crucial tasks or hobbies.

Bonus read: Looking for more targeted help? Check out our comprehensive guides on organizing your Gmail and Outlook inboxes.

We sourced nine email organization tips professionals use to rescue themselves from the digital inbox avalanche—most of them are surprisingly simple. They include:

1. Start with a deep inbox purge

2. Unsubscribe from emails you hardly open

3. Keep work emails separate from personal ones

4. Slot inbox management into your daily schedule 

5. Divide and conquer with labels and folders

6. Prioritize emails by using the stars function

7. Archive non-essential emails and snooze non-urgent ones

8. Practice the two-minute rule

9. Streamline tasks with AI-powered automation 

If your emails have piled up over time, it’s always a good idea to kick off with a deep purge. But before you start, take a few minutes to assess your inbox. How many unread emails do you have to review, and how many do you receive daily on average? 

This will give you a baseline from which you can start to improve, and also help you understand which practices can help you sort through and organize your inbox quickly. 

Next, you want to get rid of every unwanted email clogging up your inbox by mass-deleting outdated emails that no longer serve a purpose. These messages include:

• Promotional emails: Search for and delete newsletters or marketing blasts that you don’t read, emails from retailers or websites you don’t buy from, and emails with subject lines like “Sale,” “Discount,” or “Offer.”

• Outdated notifications: Delete notifications from social media platforms or apps you don’t use frequently and remove automated updates or alerts that are no longer relevant.

• No longer relevant messages and threads: Delete emails that contain information you already have elsewhere, such as invites on your calendar. You can also remove emails in lengthy email threads where your contribution is no longer needed.

As a note of caution, double-check before you mass delete emails to ensure you’re not deleting anything important. 

Keep reading: Learn what happens to your old Gmail emails after a certain amount of time and find out how to delete all promotions in Gmail.

Once you’ve done the initial deep purge, keep your emails from piling up again. Unsubscribing from promotional emails and newsletters is a good way to prevent this, as it reduces the amount of incoming, noncritical messages. 

If you regularly ignore a newsletter or consistently archive certain emails, it’s probably time to unsubscribe. You can always resubscribe later if you need the service again. 

The traditional way to unsubscribe is by using your email provider’s built-in unsubscribe button. It’s usually found in the email header, message menu, or at the bottom of the email. Once you click the button, it either unsubscribes you immediately or redirects you to the sender’s website to confirm your choice. Though effective, this process can be time-consuming.

Alternatively, you can use an email cleaner app—a more efficient solution that allows you to select newsletters you no longer need and unsubscribe from them at once. What’s more, these apps often allow you to bulk delete emails as well, so they’re useful for a deep inbox purge. 

Keep reading: If you’re looking for a Gmail cleaner app, take a look at this list of recommended services.

When work and personal emails share the same account, it typically leads to inbox chaos. Managing separate accounts for different purposes can help you keep clutter in check and streamline your email routine.

There are several free email tools you can use for different aspects of your email needs, such as work correspondence, personal emails, and subscriptions to online services or platforms. This helps keep things simpler, so you know which account to head to for specific needs. 

Use this quick guide to decide which categories to create an email account for:

If you want to get even more specific, you can create additional email accounts for frequent activities like travel, volunteering, shopping, social media, etc. Note that creating too many accounts can quickly become overwhelming, so choose categories that genuinely improve your organization and efficiency.

If you receive a high volume of emails daily, treat inbox management as an essential task on your to-do list. Set aside a specific timeframe to focus solely on managing your inbox and block that slot in your schedule. 

For instance, if you want to spend no more than an hour each day attending to your inbox, add a one-hour block labeled “Email Management” to your to-do list. Alternatively, you can break that block into smaller 20-minute chunks spread out across your entire day—before work starts, after lunch, before your shift ends, etc.

Daily scheduled inbox organization allows you enough time to attend to priority emails and reduce the clutter in your inbox without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. 

Many email providers offer standard inbox management tools to help cut down clutter. Labels and folders, for instance, help you tag and file away emails from your main inbox so you know exactly where to find an email when looking for one. 

Here’s how the features work for popular email providers like Gmail and Outlook: 

Gmail offers labels for email organization. To create a label, take the following steps:

1. Open the Gmail desktop or web app

2. Navigate downward and click on the + icon beside Labels

3. You’ll be prompted to enter a new label name

4. Click Create once you’re done

Outlook, on the other hand, has the folder feature. To create a folder, right-click on your Inbox or an existing folder, select Create new subfolder, and you’re all set. You can then move emails into the newly created folder or apply labels to specific emails. 

If you want to automatically sort incoming emails into your created labels and folders, you need to set up filters in Gmail or rules in Outlook. You can create a filter based on the email sender, subject line, date, or other relevant criteria, and the email service will sort them into the appropriate category as they come in. 

Instead of spending time searching for emails you know you’ll need later, use “stars” to prioritize them. Email providers like Gmail allow you to add a star to an email to distinguish it from others, and even better, the starred messages get filed in a separate inbox for easy access. 

The process is pretty straightforward, too:

1. Open your Gmail inbox on a desktop or via the web

2. Click on the star icon on the left of the message

For mobile devices, all you need to do is:

1. Find the star icon on the right of the message in the inbox

2. Visit the Starred folder to find emails that you’ve starred

Different email services offer this feature in various ways. For example, Outlook uses flags, while Yahoo also uses the star method. Identify the way your email provider handles it and use it accordingly. 

Many email providers offer these two powerful tools for inbox organization—archiving and snoozing. Although both features can help you declutter your inbox, they serve distinct purposes:

• Archiving removes emails from your inbox but stores them in a separate location, which you can later access. The archive button looks like a box icon with a down arrow or a lid.

• Snoozing temporarily hides emails and brings them back to your inbox at your preferred time. In most email apps, the snooze button is often represented by a clock icon.

The following table summarizes their uses, and you can use it to determine when to archive and when to snooze: 

This is a time management technique that was made popular by author David Allen in his book, “Getting Things Done.” The idea is simple:

If an email action can be completed within two minutes or less, do it immediately. This means that instead of postponing the task or adding it to your to-do list, you should do it right away. Here’s how you can implement this organizational strategy:

1. Assess your unread email list frequently to identify potential two-minute tasks

2. Once you open an email, quickly determine what action it requires, such as:

   • Replying quickly 

   • Forwarding 

   • Adding as an event

   • Deleting or archiving

3. If the action takes two minutes or less, do it at once. If you perceive that it’ll take longer, add it to your to-do list and handle it later

Even with the best manual organizational habits, email can still eat up a lot of time. That’s where the power of AI becomes invaluable. 

Imagine if your email client could handle many of your time-consuming tasks, freeing up your time so you can focus on the important tasks. A growing number of AI-powered tools are emerging to revolutionize the way we manage our inboxes. These solutions go beyond traditional filters, using smart automation to label, sort, and prioritize emails based on your preferences, which can save valuable time.

These email clients can also provide an efficiency boost when it comes to email composition itself. With the AI-assisted email writing features, they can help you quickly draft responses or generate replies to common inquiries so you no longer spend time staring at a blank screen. 

What’s more, these AI-powered tools help you finally catch up and stay on top of lengthy email threads by providing intelligent email summarization so you grasp the key points immediately.

If you need an email tool that embraces these AI-driven capabilities to help you reclaim your time and achieve a truly organized inbox, Notion Mail is a great option worth exploring.

Notion Mail offers an AI-native inbox management service designed to help you take back your time and focus. Its core strength lies in AI-powered features that take care of the tedious aspects of email management, making your inbox easier and more efficient to manage. 

Take a look at Notion Mail’s key organizational features and discover how they work:

Notion Mail also offers other helpful email management features, including:

• Customizable views: Create tailored “inboxes within an inbox” to focus on specific priorities, eliminating the need to open multiple email accounts to manage your email.

• Keyboard shortcuts: Navigate and process emails quickly using efficient productivity-boosting keyboard commands.

• Snippets: Insert frequently used email content as reusable templates to reduce repetitive typing.

Notion Mail is exclusively a Gmail client, and you’ll need a Gmail or Google account to sign up. 

Notion Mail is free to use forever, with many of its core features available upon signing up. The signup process is simple—all you need to do is connect with your Gmail or Google account. If you want to explore more advanced AI functions, consider getting the Notion AI add-on. 

Bonus read: Struggling with managing your inbox or facing issues with your current email setup? Explore our in-depth guides and unbiased reviews to find a solution:

• Gmail account not receiving emails

• Best Gmail apps for Mac

• Top four alternatives for Outlook

• Gmail not syncing witht the iPhone Mail app

• How to find unread emails in Gmail