I’ve found email to be my very biggest time drain on my business. No matter how hard I try not to, I insist (to myself) on keeping my email inbox open and letting the distractions drive me to be highly unproductive.

Well, a little while ago I said ‘No More!’ and got organized to the extreme with my email. It has saved me TONS of time and eliminated many time drains. It’s also made me more money because now, instead of reading and answering client emails as they come to me, they get filed away into the proper folder until I am on the clock and really ready to deal with client issues.

How Can I Check My Email Online & Simplify My Life?

I’ve always had a web-based email address. Checking my email online means that I am not tied to any one computer to check and respond to emails. This is really important if you travel or spend any time working on different computers. The online email system I always recommend is gmail.

Here are some things you must do to keep your email from draining you of your time!

Email Filters
How did I ever live without email filters!? These little settings are amazing. I use gmail so if you do here’s exactly how to set up filters in gmail: Go to Settings > Click Filters > Click Create New Filter > Enter in the details that you want to filter by such as who the emails are from, the specific email address or specific titles > Click Save

I use filters for so many things now.

All my client email go directly into their own ‘Label’ or folder and get looked at when I am working for that client. All my newsletters go in to one folder and I look at them when I’m ready and not as they come in. I also unsubscribed from a lot of newsletters that just took up my time. All my email subscribe notifications are filtered directly into their own folder and google alerts have their own folders too.

Email Folders/Labels
I had over 100 labels (folders) to keep track of! This was just way too many. Create a plan for your folders just like with anything else.

Ask yourself these questions: What do you need to keep track of? What’s the best way to do that? What folders do you currently have that you can get rid of?

Yes, this will take up a chunk of time but you WILL feel a huge relief when it’s all said and done.

Color Coding
Gmail has some great color coding but I believe programs like Outlook also have this. It’s not enough just to color code and hope you remember. Before you color code, create a plan for what each color means and email it to yourself and save it in a folder where you can reference if you need to.

Starring/Flagging
I found out that Gmail not only has yellow stars but all different colors and also has exclamation points and other little symbols. This is another way to categorize but remember don’t make this too complicated and create a plan for what each star or flag means.

Clearing Out the Inbox
I always liked a clean inbox and tried to clear it out every day. Now with the filters this is even easier to do. It’s amazing how many emails you get that you really don’t need to see or deal with at all. Look at your email inbox right now – do you have emails that you could live without reading at all? Unsubscribe and give yourself some more time (of course, don’t unsubscribe to marketer’s mojo – that one goes in the Newsletter filter

Create Standard Replies
I’m still working on this one and I know it’s going to free up even more time. If you get questions that are asked over and over create typical replies that you can just copy and paste into an email and customize a little where needed. In order to recognize the same questions, start saving all your questions to a folder and then weekly start looking them over for similar questions. One you have questions with typical replies, start a FAQ section on your website and direct people to the FAQ instead of typing up an email reply.

Understand your email program
Do you know how your email program works? Just by taking some time to really look at the settings in my gmail (which I’ve used for 6 years by the way) I found many of the features I’m talking about here today. Just about an extra 15-20 minutes to really get to know what I was using has likely saved me hours and hours of sorting through emails I just don’t need.