The second chapter in Gretchen Rubin’s book “The Happiness Project” is all about cleaning up your life. The theory is that an organized and de-cluttered life, is also a happier life – or something like that.

This weekend, I thought that I’d test out this advice. I set aside a block of 4 hours Friday afternoon in order to take on the momentus task of organizing my e-mail inbox. This wasn’t enough time.

I had over 300 unopened e-mails (mostly newsletters that I’ve subscribed to), and a HUGE back-up of opened e-mails stretching backwards to 2008 – when I first opened my gmail account. I think it might be a little bit of an understatement to say that this was an intimidating task to tackle, but I decided that the best way to do it was one step at a time. I didn’t really want to do it either. Reading or writing sounded like a much more pleasurable and productive use of my time, but I figured that the longer I put it off, the worse it was going to get. I might as well just bite the bullet.

At the end of the 4 hours I had deleted over 10,000 old e-mails, and brought my unread e-mail count down to 0. I also created a variety of categories in which to separate my e-mails including:

• Receipts
• Bills
• Submissions (for acting work)
• Writing (with sub categories for the different publications I write for)
• Acting (with sub categories for the e-mail interactions I’ve had with the various film and theatre productions I’ve been in)
• And then some person specific categories for people who I interact with  a lot.

In total, I created 17 different categories, with 18 subcategories.

Alas, I’m not even close to being done! I still have 1500 e-mails to sort through, and I have a feeling that I’ll probably have to allocate another 2-3 hours to finishing off this crazy task.

Still, as I prematurely reflect on this task I have to admit, I definitely feel a lot lighter. With a semi-organized inbox I feel a little less scatter-brained, and a little more in control of my life.

I’ve also just been offered a job writing for Cella Magazine (click on the link to read my bio) – bringing my e-mail count up to 4. With four different e-mails to manage, you can bet that I really need to be on my game.

If this is a task that you have on your to-do list, I highly recommend taking the time to just do it. I promise, you’ll feel so much better after it’s done and behind you.

With that in mind, here are the steps that I’ve used to organize my inbox.

How to Organize your E-mail Inbox in 5 Simple Steps

1. Weed out the newsletters – If you’re like me, and subscribe to a lot of different newsletters (that you don’t always open), then step one is to create a list of the e-mails these newsletters come from. Once you have your list, you can bulk delete these from your inbox by typing their e-mail into the search box at the top of your inbox. Gmail will separate those e-mails out from the rest of the pack, and you can delete them in one fell swoop. Even if you do read them, there really isn’t any reason to keep them in your inbox forever. For the rare exception, separate them into their own separate folder.  I recommend starting with this step, because you’ll see an immediate decrease in your inbox that will serve as great motivation as you continue forward.
2. Create your categories – Identify the main areas of focus in your life. In Steven Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” there is a section about sharpening the saw. Covey identified 4 different focuses essential to self-improvement that you should work to nurture every week: Intellectual, Spiritual, Social, Physical. I recommend that you organize your inbox in this same way. Make these focuses into categories, and then create sub-categories that are specific to you to branch out of these 4 main focuses. Doing this will also give you a  visible cue for the areas in your life that you may be neglecting.
3. Start from the back – You can delete old irrelevant e-mails a lot quicker by starting from the back (as in from the oldest e-mails in your inbox). Hit select all for each page, carefully scan for any e-mails you want to keep, uncheck those e-mails, and then hit delete. I found that I was able to work much more efficiently by starting at the back.
4. Be Ruthless –  In her book, Gretchen provides some tips for cleaning out your closet. I think these same tips could also probably be applied to cleaning our your inbox. Her categories (re-worked to apply to e-mails) are: Nostalgic e-mails, freebie e-mails (newsletters, etc), bargain e-mails (all of the flyers you subscribe to), and important e-mails. You’ll mostly be able to delete all of the bargain and freebie e-mails (with some exceptions). Your task will be to sift through the nostalgic e-mails and decide which ones you’d like to keep. For example, I kept one newsletter from my university days, and I also kept e-mail feedback from my professors. None of that is relevant to me now, but I would still like to keep it. The best part, e-mail doesn’t take up any room – so you can be a little bit generous with yourself here.
5. Be Patient  – this is going to take some time, so be aware to find your extra supply of patience. You don’t want to move too quickly, and accidentally delete something that you didn’t mean to delete.

I hope that was helpful. And just for an update: my cold showers are still going strong. I completed day 10 today. More on this to come.