New study on how to make emails about conversations again

A recent study conducted by Fair Custodian found that 28 percent of people receive 20 or more emails per day, with 93 percent of people saying that less than half of the emails they receive are actually wanted. But how can we manage our inboxes more effectively so we are only getting the emails that we want to read?

For many people, achieving the ultimate ‘Inbox Zero’ is an ongoing daily task that can seem impossible. A busy work inbox and constant stream of marketing newsletters can be overwhelming at times, especially when you’re striving to get that email count down to zero before 5pm.

When email was introduced to the world, it offered us the opportunity to make conversations easier. By ditching snail mail, people were able to interact with relatives, colleagues and friends all over the world much more quickly than ever before. It also opened a whole new world for marketeers, who now had a cost-effective way to reach their audiences on a mass scale.

Originally coined by productivity expert Merlin Mann in 2007, ‘Inbox Zero’ is a status in which your email inbox is clear of all unread emails and you’re free to make creative decisions and focus on work that really matters. As well as increasing productivity, for some people ‘Inbox Zero’ can provide mental health benefits and reduce stress levels.

A new year is the perfect time to adopt new methods and the experts at Fair Custodian believe it’s time to make emails about conversations again, so they have pulled together the following tips on how you can achieve ‘Inbox Zero’ in 2019.

1. Clean up your newsletter subscriptions

In 2018, around 281.1 billion emails were sent and received each day* and that is set to only increase in the coming years. It is now easier than ever to sign up to multiple newsletters and marketing emails that are sometimes only read once and never opened again.

Spend some time going through the emails that you receive on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and ask yourself if you really need that subscription. If it’s something that you read regularly then great, but if it’s an email that’s regularly sitting in your deleted items, it’s time to unsubscribe.

2. Use colour coded labels and folders

Many email providers now offer the ability to colour code or add labels to emails, making them easier to find in busy inboxes.

Have a think of some key categories that your emails could be sorted in to and make an effort to move relevant emails into folders so that they are tidy and easy to refer to at a later date.

3. Turn off your mobile notifications

It may be an obvious one but turning off your mobile notifications can be beneficial in reducing stress levels, especially outside of work hours or if you manage multiple email inboxes.

By hiding notifications and checking emails on a regular basis, you can save yourself the panic of that email count increasing. It’s also great practice for a healthy work/life balance.

4. Use a separate tool to manage conversations and marketing newsletters

Tools such as Fair Custodian can help ensure your inbox is used for conversations again. Through its dashboard feature, the site allows users to create different profiles that are linked to anonymous email addresses, which you can use as you wish.

Now your daily news digests will be received in one place and easily accessed at a later time, allowing your inbox to be clear for the things that really matter on a Monday morning.

5. Save important emails in a separate folder

Busy inboxes can be hard to manage and important emails are easy to lose, especially if you constantly find yourself deleting hundreds to keep that unread number as low as possible.

Get into the habit of saving important emails in a separate folder so they are easy to find and more importantly, not deleted in a mad frenzy!