Declutter Your Inbox: Just Another Way to Simplify Your Life

Nothing can be more discouraging than waking up every morning to a cluttered inbox full of emails. Day-old emails, week-old emails, even some month-old emails seem to have snuck their way in. Stacks of superfluous mail file themselves in straight rows across your screen that seem to say, "Clean us up, if you dare." But don't let the numbers count against you; take the first proactive step to simplifying your life. Declutter your inbox.

Hey, I heard that groan you made just now. You don't have to convince me that cleaning up a messy inbox is an unsolicited, daunting task. But I've experienced stress relief by merely filing and deleting emails. It's like PC therapy, in a funny way. Look, I'm not telling you to do it without a little help; I'll give you some hints to get you started.

1. If you're like me, you have trouble getting rid of emails featuring cool YouTube videos, awesome fighter jet pictures, or notes from your best friends. So, instead of deleting them, I file them away. If you're using Microsoft Outlook, or something comparable, I highly recommend creating subfolders strategically named for its contents. For example, I have folders entitled Blog, College, Funnies, Good Info, Good Sites, Music, Videos, and the like. I entitled others with the names of my best friends for easy access to each email they've ever sent me. This way, you're not staring at loads of read and re-read emails every morning, but you can still retrieve them later.

2. Reply-itis. This is the syndrome that comes from you and your recipient sending replies back and forth to each other that pertain to one subject. The conversation is important, so you can't afford to delete the info, but do you really need ALL THOSE EMAILS? Hardly. Save only the latest reply. This carries all of the previous information in one email; delete the rest immediately.

3. News-related material: If you still saved that link to the "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" trailer from last year, it's high time to get rid of it. To permanently delete emails, right-click an email, press Shift, and choose "Delete" from the drop-down menu. This will bypass the Delete folder entirely, eliminating the step of purging your deleted emails.

4. Delete junk as soon as you receive it. Meaningless notes and emails that only deserve one reading need to be deleted as soon as you finish reading them. It will only pile up for the Saturday purge if you leave it.

5. Make all of this a daily routine. You can catalogue an email into its corresponding folder as soon as you're finished reading it; it only takes five seconds of your time, and it eliminates that junky inbox effect.

Don't simply sit back every day and accept a dumpy e-mailbox. Make the decluttering process habitual, and you will never again have to look forward to an email purge day.