Episode 48: How I Finally Tackled My Cluttered Inbox (And What Changed)
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
If your inbox feels like one more thing on your already overloaded to-do list, you're not alone. In this episode, I'm talking about the tense topic of email management. What started as a personal experiment to escape inbox overwhelm turned into a game-changing system that’s simple, sustainable, and built for real life.
Whether you're juggling work emails, school sign-ups, mychart notifications, or just trying not to miss something important, this episode offers a refreshing, realistic approach to getting your inbox under control—without the pressure of perfection.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why sorting and processing email are two very different tasks (and how separating them saves time)
The 4-folder system that simplifies everything
How to stop letting your inbox dictate your to-do list
Why decluttering your digital space can actually feel cathartic
This is for the working mom who wants less stress, fewer missed communications, and more peace of mind. Tune in and give your inbox a reset!
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I was not planning to talk about email today, but I. You know when something just keeps popping up, you either hear about a topic, multiple people bring it up to you, or it's just everywhere you look. That is how email and inbox management has felt for me over the last couple of weeks, and so I thought, you know what?
Maybe I'm not alone. Maybe there are other people who are thinking about this as well right now too, and so let's talk about it. I know that everyone has their own unique relationship and experience with email, with inbox management, and I will just share. Right out of the gate that for years, I have lived with a cluttered inbox, maybe I should say cluttered inboxes because this is true for both my work inbox and my personal inbox, and this was also true.
Of my corporate inbox when I worked in corporate as well. So I acknowledge that for those of you who cannot end your workday or go to sleep at night without cleaning out your inbox, that mine would give you nightmares. But I have been curious for years. About what it is like to have a well-managed inbox.
Could that make a difference? Do I want to be the type of person who prioritizes spending time on managing my inbox? Yes or no? I'm not sure. I'll say mine. Historically has not been out of control, but it's always been full. I have somehow learned to just zero in on the most important communications and I'm able to tune the rest out.
But lately I've been feeling the nudge I to get back to a process of keeping things more manageable. Because honestly, right now when I'm recording this, it's still in the middle of Maycember. Especially on the personal side, but also professionally. I have been this close. To missing deadlines, ? Not getting my contribution in for the coach's gift card. Not signing up for that thing, not rescheduling a session for a client. I have been this close to missing things because the volume of messages that I have to comb through to be able to zero in on the important things has just increased.
I've had several clients who are working on this as a part of their goals in coaching right now. , and I thought, what better time than for me to practice this myself? Several years ago I experimented with filing for quote unquote email bankruptcy. It is was essentially this process of dragging everything from my inbox into a folder.
That was like to be sorted so that I could just start in my inbox with very few messages. I think I would do only the current months worth of messages knowing that I could always sort those archived emails in the future if I wanted to. I could still search for them, I could still find them, but it just reset.
But without a process to manage new messages coming in, I quickly. I fell back into having an overwhelming inbox. I quickly fell back into old habits of only addressing the important things and ended up right back where I started with hundreds of emails in my inbox. So the process. And organization structure that I am going to walk you through today in this episode is borrowed from a book, which I will link to in the show notes.
You can grab that link at themothernurture.com/podcast. It is from the book Uptime, A Personal Guide to Productivity and Wellbeing. It's written by Laura Mae Martin. Great book, loved it. Read it a couple of years ago, and the piece that still to this day stands out to me was her chapter on email. So before I get to telling you the how of organizing and processing through your inbox, I want to answer the question from my very recent, real lived experience of whether or not investing the time in cleaning out and organizing my inbox was worth it.
I will say that it does feel different. It does feel different to open up my inbox and see. Very little. If anything, sitting there and the things that are sitting there are just the things that I have yet to process to know that things are not falling through the cracks. I'm not missing a deadline to not wonder what else might be buried here beneath all of these messages that I just didn't notice.
It's very similar to the way that I teach to-do list management as well. Having that running to-do list as a home where you can keep all of the things that you need or want to do someday for safekeeping. So knowing that I've seen that I've processed, that, I've taken action on all of the emails in my inbox, gives me this peace of mind that things are not falling through the cracks.
It was cathartic too. I have to say. I started with just managing my business inbox and I did it in a couple of sittings. Next up, I will move to my personal inbox as well, but it did feel so cathartic and once I got into the groove of moving and sorting and deleting, it did get faster and easier and felt so good.
There was also a lot of freedom that I felt from unsubscribing, from unnecessary emails. Things that at one point were really important and meaningful and valuable, and now my life has changed and they're not, and that's okay. I know that I can always go back and resubscribe. I like thinking about unsubscribing as.
Giving me the ability or the choice to be proactive rather than reacting to a sales email or someone telling me, right, this is important. This is a topic you should read about. I get to instead proactively choose, I get to go seek out that retailer or that thought leader just to see what they have produced or have available when I think about it, and if I don't think about it, then it's probably not worth my time.
So that was really freeing. And then the power of having this predetermined sorting system that I'm gonna walk you through here in just a couple of minutes. It feels so good. It is equivalent to making a decision in advance about exactly what I'm going to do. Anytime I open my inbox. There's no more just kind of scrolling through or again, reacting to whatever is easiest or at the top, or I think will be the fastest thing to reply to and clear out.
I have a predetermined process, and it means that in the moment I don't have to make another decision. Which is huge and gives me more energy as I go through my day. I also realized that my inbox, even though I was telling myself that I was very good at zeroing in on just the important things and ignoring the rest, that it was weighing on me more than I realized that question of am I missing anything?
Is there something that I haven't gotten to that was weighing on me? Now that I've experienced both ways, having , an extremely full, maybe somewhat cluttered inbox, and one that is streamlined and clean and organized, I can say that I do prefer the latter for a tool that I open or that you open multiple times a day.
It just feels so much more calming. I also know that if life gets busy and I fall back into old habits, I'll be okay. I'll be okay. I've been there before. I've navigated a full inbox before. It's not the end of the world, and I can always, in a couple of sittings get back to where I am now. So there is not this insane pressure to keep it. I'm not gripping tight to the way my inbox looks today. I am just acknowledging that it does feel good and I can always choose to come back here if I have a busy season, and this falls a little bit to the wayside, I.
Okay, so here is what this new system looks like and how I went about sorting my inbox. So if you are maybe like me and you have a rather large, full cluttered inbox, and you're curious to know if it's possible to actually clean things out, to organize things, to process through your emails in an. Easier way in a more timely fashion.
This is what is working for me. Again, there are so many ways to navigate and manage an inbox. I'm not here to say this is the way to do it, but I have been sharing this with a number of clients who are also experimenting with this and having some success. So. I first set up four categories or four folders, if that's how , your inbox, , labels things.
And for me, those were to read, to respond, to revisit, and to do so, to read, to respond, to revisit, and to do. As I was going through that initial sort, I was either deleting or dragging into one of these four categories. Now, depending on how you like to archive things, there were certainly things in my inbox that I didn't necessarily need to put into.
Any of those four categories, and for those they went into my archive structure. Maybe it's just a single folder for archives. Since search capabilities are so great these days in inbox, maybe you have your archives sorted by, project or client type or however you do that. So you would certainly still maintain some sort of archiving structure.
But for anything that is active in your inbox, it goes into one of these four. Categories. So to read, these are the items that, for me, it looks like a lot of newsletters. Perhaps a company email that comes out about a new policy or, , just something that is sharing information. There's not necessarily a response that you need to provide a task or a to do that you need to do.
It's just for your information. It felt so good to pull a number of newsletters into that folder because I am interested in the topic. , this is something I want to read and learn about. I just don't need it to sit in my inbox right now. So pull those into to read, to respond. That's, I think, pretty self-explanatory, but any email that requires a reply from you.
You need to acknowledge something, you need to provide direction, give an answer. Whatever that is that goes into your to respond folder. If there is something that you need to revisit, so maybe you did reply, but the loop is not closed. I think we get stuck. A lot of these perpetually live in our inbox because we don't wanna forget about them, but there's not an immediate action that we need to take.
I love this folder. Now, having it for things that I can check on a periodic basis to revisit, Hey, where are we with this project? Or how are you coming on that deadline? Or, I'm waiting on a response from you. I haven't heard from you. It's been a week, right? How do we move forward with this? Move those things into revisit.
And then lastly, the category to do is any email that comes in, which again is probably a lot of them that comes in and requires you to do something in order to be able to close the loop. So perhaps you need to research something you need to. Create a report or a presentation, you need to look something up.
There is an action that you need to do outside of your inbox in order to close that loop. I would argue that those tasks that come in via email, they are asked of you via email that those tasks should live on your running to-do list so that you can. Incorporate them into your plan for either the day or the week, given your capacity and your time and your schedule.
But so often those tasks just live in our inbox and they create stress every time we look at them. We see them when we open up our inbox, and instead, I would encourage you to move those items to a to-do list so you can actually find the time, make the time to complete them. Then you just go back into.
That folder. Hit reply. Tell the person it's completed. Close the loop in whatever way you need to close the loop and then archive it. Okay? So the to-do folder is for anything that requires you to take an action outside of your inbox. If you need to take action in your inbox, that's just a reply. You need to respond to that person, okay?
And it goes in that folder instead. Now. What this does and the idea behind moving things into one of those four categories is that it is a very different task to sort emails than it is to process emails. I like to compare it to writing. So when you sit down to write something, write a paper, write a memo, write an Instagram, caption, whatever you're writing, when you sit down to write, that is one type of task.
And we slow ourselves down when we try to write and edit at the same time. If you've ever been typing and , you're writing, , you're in the flow of creating and writing something, but then you hit backspace and you change your word choice and then you write a little bit more, and then you go back and you change it.
You are switching between those two types of tasks. And many would argue that just writing first without editing, free flow writing is so much more effective. And then when you switch, you can actually go in with your editor's hat on and make the writing better. Well, the same is true of managing your inbox.
It is one skill. It is one hat. It is one role to come in and just decide, is this something I need to read, something I need to respond to, something I need to revisit, or something I need to do. And quickly drag those messages into the different categories. Then when you come back with your processing hat on, you can open up your read folder, for example, and for the next 15 minutes, just read through as many of the messages in that folder as you can, or open up your respond folder and reply to as many messages as you can get through in the next 30 minutes.
Or add things to your to-do list so that when you sit down to actually take care of tasks, you are taking action on the things that came in via your inbox. But to switch back and forth between what is the next action I need to take on this message, and then actually taking the action slows us down. So in this method, you are coming into your inbox. Having decided in advance is my goal here to sort the new messages that have come in since the last time I sorted, or is my goal here to process through one of the four folders and actually do the thing that that folder necessitates that I do.
It is essentially batching, and I have found it to be so much faster to split up the sorting and the processing now, not every day works out for me to be able to divide these two types of email tasks between sorting and processing, but on the days when it does work, it really works. I am so effective when I can just reply to 10 messages in a row without having to switch between things that I need to read and things that I need to take action on, or things that I need to revisit. So again, for me personally, I'm not going for perfection when it comes to my inbox, but I am going for efficiency. I am aiming for.
An easier experience. I want to be, the kind of person who replies in a timely fashion, who I. Doesn't miss deadlines that were sent via email, who takes action on the things that come in via email that I need to take action on. And I have found that having a process outlined in the way that this process is outlined has greatly helped me be efficient.
When I jump to my inbox to know whether I am sorting or whether I am processing and if I am processing, which of those four categories am I starting with today? My high goal is not to live in my inbox. It is just a tool. It is a great tool. It allows us to communicate so much, so easily, but I want my action to take place outside of my inbox. And so for me. Having a system like this that allows me to get in and get out, that allows me to be efficient and effective with the time that I have to spend in my inbox has been so helpful and it does feel better.
It does feel better to open that inbox and not be overwhelmed by all of the things that I could and should do, but to make those decisions, drag those messages into their respective folders, and then take action.
If you like having a step-by-step process like this one that we've outlined today for your inbox, you may also like my guide to getting things done as a working mom, which walks you through similarly in a step-by-step fashion, how to create an effective to-do list to manage your tasks for both. Work and home.
You can grab a copy of that guide on my website at themothernurture.com/resources. As always, the links and information on anything mentioned on this episode can be found in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
If you haven't subscribed, be sure to do that, and if you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend. It means so much to me. All right, I will talk with you in the next episode and until then, take care.
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