How often do you check your email? Is that the first thing you do in the morning? Are your emails taking away from your real priorities because you just have too dang many emails to go through every day? My emails get checked every day, multiple times each day (way too often). I’m trying to get better at only checking it twice a day (gasp) because it takes up too much of my time! Don’t you feel like it’s an endless rabbit hole when you log in to check? It’s either so full of emails (mostly junk emails) to be sorted, put in the trash or looked at to see if that cute baby outfit is on sale at Carters… Those emails get to take a part of my day, EVERY day. That also means that they are taking my time and attention. I don’t really want my time and attention going to all of these junk emails or emails that I just don’t need or want. Emails are something that are coming and going at such a quick pace, that we want to stay on top of it, but it can be a really daunting task. Today I’m sharing 3 tips that I have learned to help me stay in control of my inbox.

Tip #1- Have you been to any retail store lately? If you have, I will bet they asked you for your email address and without thought, you gave it to them. A few days later, you were on their email list and now you are getting their emails all the time. Please tell me that I am not alone in this! I hate being that person in line that says, I don’t want your emails, but I don’t want them! I have a few ways I avoid this, but today I’ll just share one- unroll.me

Unroll.me is a FREE and awesome way to be able to unsubscribe from all of your emails at one time. It is a tedious task to go through and manually unsubscribe on each email you receive. It takes too much time and I’d rather be eating cold cereal and watching Grey’s Anatomy (I’m so behind this season). When you go to unroll.me you will put in your email address and then it will pull up everything you are subscribed too and I mean EVERYTHING! The first time I did this, I was shocked at how many it pulled up. There were too many things taking up space and time in my life that I just didn’t need. From there, you decide to keep in inbox, unsubscribe, or add it to a rollup.  The rollup will gather all the subscribed emails you want to keep and only send you one email with them all in it. It’s pretty cool! I used to do that option and now I basically just always unsubscribe from everything. This is such a helpful tool for anyone!! Seriously, just try it! Trust me on this one!! Go to unroll.me RIGHT NOW!

Tip #2- If you are using your email (gmail accounts only) to connect with clients or customers, you need Boomerang. Boomerang makes it so I can schedule emails to go out at a certain time. That means that I can actually be at my computer typing an email at 11:30pm and schedule it to send the next morning when I’m in “business hours.” This is good for multiple reasons. First, I can get to emails when I can but I don’t have to make it seem like I only respond late at night. I don’t want to send an email late at night and have them get a notification that could possibly wake them up because an email came in. Secondly, I really don’t want our clients to think that I will respond at anytime of day. We like to have a break from work. We want to be able to fully focus on each other instead of being glued to our phones and computers all the time to be able to respond instantly. If I’m sending an email at 11:30pm it gives clients a “permission” to be trying to get ahold of us at that time. Get Boomerang and get scheduling those emails!!

Tip #3- Have you utilized the folders/categories part of Gmail? I’m a folder freak. I like things to be kept organized and in a place that I will know where they are if I need to find them. But I also don’t want things just sitting in my inbox. When one of our 2017 brides sends us an email, I will respond and then move it into the 2017 brides folder. If this is an email full of correspondence, each time she replies it will be pulled into my inbox. After I have read it, replied, or done the needed task, I can just click X on the inbox cateogry and away it goes from inbox, straight into the 2017 brides folder so I don’t lose it! Don’t be afraid of folders! They are here to help you. But PLEASE do not go crazy and keep everything. Not all emails are created equally. Meaning you should not be keeping every single little thing that comes into your inbox. Let things go when it is time! 🙂

Any questions?! Send me an email! I’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as I can! info@michelleandlogan.com

This is what unroll.me will look like when it’s time to get unsubscribing! 🙂