How to Conquer your Email Overload
I’ve written before about my struggles with Email hoarding and digital organization in general. There are very few areas of my life where I need professional help, but Email overload is one of them! Thankfully, I have finally found a solution that works for me.
I think everyone struggles with Email overload these days. I’m pretty good about weeding out of some of it. I unsubscribe from all shopping Emails, (check out my post for that) or keep them corralled in a separate folder. I’m pretty reasonable about not signing up for TOO many newsletters, though I have a few ones I genuinely enjoy. And I have no problem about unsubscribing to anything that doesn’t bring me real value, but it still piles up and up.
HOWEVER, I’m a blogger, so that alone generates probably 60 or 70 Emails a day
- Notifications I need to see from clients
- Pitches from advertisers
- Comments or notifications from my two sites
- Conversations within various support groups
- Plus newsletters that I genuinely want to read because they have relevant info.
I’m also a VA (Virtual Assistant), so I get frequent notifications from my clients about things they want me to do, or problems to solve. Plus, I’m a Scout leader, so there are always numerous conversations going on about campouts or various Scouting activities. Then there’s just life – Emails from friends or relatives, my son’s college, confirmations when I buy stuff, etc.
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This adds up to a lot of Emails and it’s not just junk that I can easily delete. It’s valuable information that I need and want to see. I’m sure you have the same issues and it can be overwhelming. I check my Email about every two hours, just to keep on top of it, but I still needed help to manage my inbox.
So, I signed up for a inbox management service called Mailstrom. What a HUGE difference it has made in helping me manage my inbox! This was EXACTLY what I needed – maybe it can help you too. I’ve used it for about 2 years now. It’s helped me manage THOUSANDS of Emails, quickly and easily. The estimate is that managing your Email can take you 500 or 600 hours per year – that’s HUGE. If you can use a tool like this, you can shave valuable hours off your time. And let’s face it, time IS money, especially if you are running a business.
Mailstrom Features to Blow Up your Email Overload
Mailstrom really is a brilliant solution to your Email overload woes. Here are some of the features it offers:
- Filtering – I LOVE that you can filter your inbox in about a dozen different ways. For instance, my Scout leaders – over the course of a month, I may end up with 40 or 50 conversations from different Scouters scattered through my inbox. Mailstrom allows me to filter by sender name or by conversation, so I can click, click, click to grab multiple conversations different folks. Then I can scoot them all off to my Scout folder. There is no other way I can think of that I could do that. You can also filter by domain, so I can also grab all my Pinterest Emails or all my shopping confirmations from Amazon and delete or move them. So helpful!
- Expire – This is without a doubt my FAVORITE feature. You can set certain Emails to go to an expired folder. If I haven’t read that newsletter in 10 days, I’m probably never going to read it. So Mailstrom neatly plucks it out of my inbox and shifts it over to my Expire folder. I haven’t lost it and I can still go back to read it later if I want, but it’s out of my hair! This works on both read and unread Emails, which is so handy because I will often read something, but forget to delete it after I’m done. It’s like having a full-time maid for my Email – they just clean up behind me without any effort on my part. Love it!
- Unsubscribe and Spam buttons – Mailstrom will handle all your unsubscribes for you, so you can just go in once a week or so and click, click, click and unsubscribe from a bunch of things at once. Done deal, and Mailstrom will even move them to your junk folder until the unsubscribe takes effect. Same thing with Spam – it just magically disappears.
- Filter by Time Period – This is another useful feature. I can pull up Emails by month, year, or week. For instance, I have 18 Emails from December of 2014 still in my inbox. If they’ve survived this many Email purges, they usually are something important, but I probably should move them off to a folder. I can see the subject and sender of each one so I can decide where to move it to.
- Chill button – There also is a handy Chill feature. I can delay a message til later to deal with it when I have more time.
I can’t tell you how much better my Inbox has been since I’ve started using Mailstrom. It still requires a bit of effort on my part, but it’s SO much easier. For instance, this morning I noticed my inbox was piled up a bit, so I went in and with about 15 minutes of work, I had removed a cool 1,000 Emails.
The fabled “Inbox Zero” is probably never going to happen for me – I am a visual person and I need to keep things in my Inbox where I can see them or I will forget about them. But if I can easily manage it down to just the essential items, that is exactly what I need.
I hope you will give Mailstrom a try. I’ve used several different mail management services and I think it definitely is worth the $6.95 a month to manage my Email. If you will use my affiliate link shown here, you will get a $5 credit and I will too.
