Conquer Email – Using Email Filters

Ready to conquer your email? Using email filters is of the quickest ways to start!

Chances are if you are running a business, email is one of those things that can quickly take over your day. It’s one of those nagging areas I see my client’s, friends and family members struggling with regularly and something I struggled with for a long time too.

Email stole so many hours from my week and caused me so much unnecessary stress. Every time that notification went off I was anxious to check, had a crazy FOMO, and was worried I was missing an important task from a client. Most of the time however, it was just another advertisement from Crate and Barrel or Facebook.

Not having a system caused so much anxiety too. I didn’t know where anything was, what to do with this email or that one, and I could never find what I needed quickly…even with search!

I finally got fed up one day and decided that it was time I made it a priority. Email was one of my ‘Elephants’, and it was feeding time! That day, I went on a journey into my inbox and I didn’t come out until I had finally conquered it! That day, I got found the elusive Inbox Zero, and let me tell you, I FELT GOOD!

Like this kind of good! —–>

These days I get to inbox zero almost every day, and I want to show you how you can easily do it too. I am not going to lie…initially there will be some work involved, but the payoff is well worth it, and honestly…it’s not that much work.

Get Your Day Back!
Conquering your email can save you SO MUCH TIME because you can give assigned value to your email and view only what you need to, when you need to, and save the rest for later. If there is an email zen…this will help you start to find it.

Today is Your Day to start eating your email Elephant!
As with any Elephant, trying to do everything, all at once, can make the task too overwhelming and trigger procrastination and avoidance. My hope with this series is to introduce little bits for you to tackle over time and help you eventually Eat Your Email Elephant.

Are you ready to conquer your email?
[GUT CHECK]

• Do you have hundreds of unread emails in your inbox?
• Are you spending more than 30 minutes a day on email?
• Do you have no clue why you get SO MUCH email or where it’s all coming from?
• Do you often spend too much time searching for important emails?
• Have you accidentally deletes important emails, never to find them again?
• Are you not taking action on your emails?

If you answered yes to more than 1 of these, you have an Elephant to Eat!

So let’s grab our first bite…Email Rules, Sorting, and Filtering

Email filtering is easy to set up. It can be used in most every email client and can be created quickly and refined over time. You will see immediate results from just a short session and once you start, I bet you’ll find it hard to stop.

Think of email filtering as having a personal email assistant who pre-sorts your email and gives you only the ones you want to see right away and leaves the rest for later. This email assistant can immediately save you time by focusing your attention on the emails which matter most. Ready to get started?

Step 1

Let’s first put together a base set of categories your emails fall into. We all have different businesses and so we probably have some varying categories our email falls into, but in a general sense, you will find categories like:

• Business
• Personal
• Legal
• Taxes
• Medical
• Newsletters
• Marketing
• Social Media
• Ads and Promotions
• etc.

Creating a list of no more than 10 main categories. Don’t worry, you can refine this later as you have time. For now, we just need to get these down as a starting point.

Step 2

Now that you have a list, I want you to sort those categories into 2 sections, High Priority & Low Priority (and not everything is a high priority).

Step 3

Now it is time to take that list into your email client and set up your filters. Each email client is a bit different, but almost all of them have filtering of one type or another. Let me demonstrate this with GMail and then below I will list some links to filtering instructions for most other email clients.

CLICK BELOW TO WATCH THE GMAIL VIDEO

(You can make the video full screen by clicking the expand icon in the bottom right.)

So now that you have the basics you can apply this to your own email client. Here are some links to get you started with the most popular clients:

Apple Mail Rules
Outlook Mail Rules
Yahoo Mail Filters
Thunderbird Filtering
AOL Mail Filters