At this point in 2019, it is safe to assume that you have heard of the cleaning and decluttering wonders of one Marie Kondo. Her lifestyle show on Netflix has taken the world by storm, and her no-nonsense ‘does this spark joy’ approach to keeping and throwing away has revolutionized many people’s lives! However, I don’t think that her approach to life and her philosophy should just be reserved for cleaning physical spaces. Here is how to give your inbox the Marie Kondo treatment.
The first thing you can do is completely empty your junk folder. When you think about it, this is a folder that you never even look in anyway apart from when you think a proper email might have been sent there by accident. It takes just one click to rid yourself of that entire collection of garbage emails, and it can give you a fresh, clean feeling right away before you even get to the ‘real’ folders and inboxes.
The next thing to tackle is the hundreds of sites that you are signed up to, that send you dozens of spam emails per week. Go through each site and ask yourself ‘does this spark joy?’. If the answer is no, and you never even open those emails from that specific site, then go ahead and take yourself off of their mailing list.
Sometimes you can get sentimental about old emails and keep them hanging around in your inbox. They do no good just sitting there, already read and never returned to. It’s time to bite the bullet and wipe the inbox slate clean. You don’t need to keep old emails in the same way that you don’t need to keep old birthday and Christmas cards.
If there are emails that you do have to keep for career purposes, then something that you can do is create a few folders that count for different categories. Sending each email to its assigned category after reading helps to keep your inbox in much better shape than before, and you will feel one hundred times more organized.