I’m making a true confession here today. I love email. I get a certain thrill when I open my inbox and find lots of missives for me. However, so many of them are not worth my time. But I don’t know that until I open it. Therein lies my problem. Too many open emails.

I was patting myself on the back a few weeks ago, I reduced my email from over a thousand to under 300.  I created a few new email folders to hold some of those remaining emails. My Word Weavers and writing business emails have their own folder. At the start of a new year I’m battling email glut again.

I need that

I realize I have this bad habit of saying WOW! What cool information. I’d better hang on to that email. Sometimes I turned the email into a word document and put it in my writing tips file in Word, or I print it off to peruse and underline later. The goal: to delete the original. Most of the time I leave the open, barely read emails hanging out in my inbox. They get shoved further and further down my ever-growing line of daily emails.

Lots of writing blogs

I subscribe to almost a dozen writing blogs. I don’t need to keep those emails. Each of these blogs has an archive. So, that awesome information is saved in cyberspace on their blog. I can mark those blogs as favorites on my server page and access the blog’s archives when I want to reread it. But alas I don’t.

Hitting the thousand-mark got laughter from my hubby who seldom remembers to delete old emails. And I’m always giving him grief about it.

Notice the file icons to the left. You can create your own files for various work or personal needs and title them. Just click and drag the email into the file area.

Got to organize

I use Gmail. It has ways for me to organize my email into files and refer back to it whenever I want. Most emails apps have ways to create files and mark your messages by importance. You can also type in the name of the sender, rather than trawl through all those old emails. Then all those sender’s emails appear, making it easier to find a special email I may need. My only excuse is procrastination

After cleaning out my email, I’d say I eliminated about 95 percent. Either advertising upgrades for programs I have, old news about contests, publications etc., that are no longer relevant and quick emails from friends about things that are long past were all tossed into the trash. The previous referred to blog archives played heavily in my deleting decision. And any messages I just couldn’t bear to part with also were placed in a file marked important.

Prepare ahead

My revelation for the need for a daily organization always comes at times when I’m desperately looking for that one email from my agent or an editor. It would be so much easier if I would immediately delete junk and prioritize those I don’t have time to look at right away.

Saying that brought DiAnn Mills to mind. She has a spreadsheet for everything. Perhaps if I made a spreadsheet with the reference to the blog post I can’t live without. Great idea! I could have a column for the topic, the specific blog, and the date it posted. I could click on the blog address and then search by date. Tah Dah! I’ll have to think on that a bit. I’m not the spreadsheet officinato DiAnn and my husband are. Unfortunately, I tend to make a spreadsheet and forget I did. *sigh*

Delete unneeded email immediately.

 Be more efficient and declutter

Keeping your email box cleaned out and filed saves hours of time, confusion, and frustration. What a welcome relief that would be.

During the time I took to empty my email, I had this needling feeling I deleted something I shouldn’t have. But it’s too late now. Another reason I should do this once a week. Who remembers what’s in months-old emails?

Next, I emptied the trash file after I was done deleting. It is gone forever. I lack the skills of the computer nerd who knows how to retrieve emails from those dark places of no return. So, I must determine to have no regrets.

Avoid rereading

I also realized I feel a deep need to open every email. This same need compels me to reread every single email before I delete it. That was a key problem that started the whole mess in the first place.

Temptation, temptation, temptation

Then there is the temptation to read all those emails when I’m not in the mood to write just yet. Hours later I no longer have time to write. Another reason to keep it clean every day. There is no monetary gain unless a contract is buried somewhere in those old missives.  I want to get paid for my writing so I need to spend more time putting words on paper and sending out queries than weeding through mountains of forgotten emails.

Starting today while 2017 is still fresh. I’m going to try to do a better job. I’m not holding my breath, though. There is way too much interesting information coming into my inbox.

How are you with your email management?

Please tell me how you manage your emails. I’d love to learn from my readers.