April Showers, Email Dings: 5 Steps to Organize Your Inbox

Written By Emily Bottegal, MS
 
 

Let’s do math: if you receive 35 emails a day on your personal email address and 45 emails a day on your work email, how many emails do you need to read a week?  The answer… a lot.  A great step to handle all these messages is to organize your inbox.  Sounds simple, but since the dings never seem to stop, it can feel like a never-ending task.  To help with this, try taking a few minutes to implement these SCUUM strategies to help create sense of your inbox and feel in control of the dings.

  • Swipe to delete- Get rid of the email you are not going to read.  You can make it an easy “swipe” setting on most phones so you can get it done quicker.

  • Create folders- Folders are a great system to keep emails organized.  You can create folders for certain hobbies, for each child, or to separate work and school.

  • Unsubscribe- Reduce the number of emails coming in by unsubscribing to promotional emails or newsletters you find yourself constantly deleting.  You can do this by scrolling to the bottom of the email and pressing “unsubscribe”.  There are additional tools like unroll.me to manage and unsubscribe from these subscription emails.

  • Use flags- This is a great feature to flag the emails you want to come back to.  The flags also allow you to find the emails with the visual color cues!

  • Make notes- If you know you need to follow up to an email but don’t have the immediate time, make a reminder in your phone or on your calendar to respond.  This helps the “oh no I forgot” and lessens your unopened emails.

Unless we get rid of our email address, we can expect to hear the dings in our future.  Take a few minutes each day to purge the emails we don’t need and read the important messages to help organize our inbox and gain control of the dings. 

Emily Bottegal, MS

Ensuring students achieve academic, social/emotional, and personal success, Emily has a passion to empower students to succeed in and out of the classroom. Emily coaches from a strength-based approach and believes every individual has the ability to achieve success with the appropriate support and skills in place. She has dedicated her professional life to working with youth in school and community settings. 

Prior to joining the team, Emily worked as a School Site Coordinator and Home-Based Counselor in the Washington, DC area. In these roles, Emily engaged directly with students through individual counseling sessions and small group interventions focused on helping students meet personal goals relating to academics and managing emotions. Her direct experience helped her to understand the challenges individuals face both academically and personally, ultimately leading to her developing lessons around time management, scheduling, study skills, and organization. 

Most recently, Emily worked at a nonprofit, helping secure specialized instruction and support necessary to improve educational outcomes for low-income children with learning disabilities and developmental delays.

Emily has a Master’s degree in Counseling from Johns Hopkins University.

http://www.lifesolvedcoaching.com/who-we-are
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