The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ““Done!”” pod­cast:

Many emails are sim­i­lar to others

Yet they often look very sim­i­lar at first glance. Every day you need to get your­self an overview of what you have received and make an assess­ment of what each email means. But, are they real­ly that unique and dif­fer­ent from one anoth­er? Would you not say that many emails resem­ble emails you have received in the past which meant much the same thing then as they do now? And, does that not mean that you should do much the same as you usu­al­ly do when you get a sim­i­lar email every time you get such an email?

Nuance your inbox effortlessly

What if the assess­ment of incom­ing emails was done auto­mat­i­cal­ly, mak­ing it eas­i­er to deter­mine what’s what in your inbox and to quick­ly sep­a­rate the wheat from the chaff?

Of course, it is pos­si­ble — at least to some extent.

Do this

If you want to nuance your inbox slight­ly and be aid­ed in how to sort the dif­fi­cult from the easy auto­mat­i­cal­ly, use the rules and fil­ters avail­able in most email apps and ‑ser­vices. Here are a few ways to do so:

1. Look through the emails cur­rent­ly in your inbox. See what emails you find that are of the same type. They may be emails con­tain­ing requests you want to respond to quick­ly, emails con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion you need and there­fore want to see when they arrive but can delete as soon as you have read them, emails with your address copied (so-called CCs), or emails that you do not have to respond to immediately.
2. Cre­ate a rule (if you use Out­look or Mail for OS X) or a fil­ter (if you have Gmail) that labels these types of emails with a sep­a­rate col­or or shade. For this pur­pose, I do not want to send the emails into a spe­cif­ic sub­fold­er or set an atten­tion-grab­bing flag, but I pre­fer a more sub­tle sig­nal, such as set­ting the text col­or in the email to a spe­cif­ic shade (for Out­look or Mail) or giv­ing the email a spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry (for Gmail). 
   
   For exam­ple, receipts on pur­chas­es in my web­shop will have green text, while newslet­ters I want to browse through quick­ly and maybe throw away, have grey text.
    
3. If you can­not think of more rules to cre­ate right now than this one, do not wor­ry. Try this one out for a while and add more if and when you deter­mine how you would ben­e­fit from using them. 

Get through it faster

If you ensure that all your emails are giv­en ele­ments that dis­tin­guish them from one anoth­er, or nuances, auto­mat­i­cal­ly, you will be able to deal with what has been sent your way both faster and with greater ease since you will get an imme­di­ate sense of what you have received at a quick glance. You will not risk keep­ing urgent emails wait­ing for your atten­tion for longer than you would like, because you can eas­i­ly see if you have received some­thing of a par­tic­u­lar kind. If you want to, you can deal with the emails that you know in advance will go quick­ly in one go. If you have been feel­ing weighed down by the sheer vol­ume of cor­re­spon­dence to get through, this will give you some relief.

How do you do it?

What are your tricks for deal­ing more quick­ly with all the emails you receive? Although more and more com­mu­ni­ca­tion is mov­ing to chat, many peo­ple con­tin­ue to receive an abun­dance of emails on a dai­ly basis (myself includ­ed) so your tip will be much appre­ci­at­ed. Feel free to write to me and share!

(Speak­ing of sort­ing your emails — are you also get­ting mes­sages you don’t real­ly need? Check out more tips on how to get rid of emails and mes­sages you do not want to spend time on!)