If you’re like me you wake up every morning, roll out of bed with your eyes half shut and attempt to sort through the plethora of emails you happened to receive during the night from various professors, group mates, clubs and societies. Most of which you either ignore or take note that you must remember to “handle that later” (which you inevitably forget to do!)

It’s no wonder we miss classes, forget our due assignments and flake out on lunch with our friends.

Here are 5 things you can do to remove the clutter and make sure you receive (and act on) those important emails.

1. Filter all your email into one box

Many universities and colleges have their own internal email system. Whilst these are useful for disseminating information amongst students, they do have a downfall.

These systems often involve logging in to the institutions website with a username and password. It’s difficult to get into the habit of checking this on a regular basis and as a result many useful emails lay unread for weeks in our inbox.

I have a number of different email addresses:, one from my home institution in Glasgow, one from Hong Kong University where I am currently on exchange, one for this blog and then my personal email account. Rather than checking them individually, I filter them all to my gmail account. Every morning when I wake up I only have to check my email once.

This saves the time and energy I would spend checking each individual email and guarantees that I receive all the emails I am supposed to. Not only this but having all your emails in the one place is the first step to better and organization and productivity.

Most university web based email programs will allow you to re-direct your emails to one specific location and I recommend you do this if you have not already done so.

2. Create a folder for each subject, club or society.

Storing emails in your inbox is the least effective way to manage them. Not only is it hard to locate old emails when you need them but having a full inbox creates a series of negative “loose ends” on your psyche.

It’s good to have a built in archiving system. How you archive your emails is up to you but I would recommend that you create a different folder or label for each class you are taking and for each club or society that you are involved with. I would also recommend a folder for “family and friends” and a general “admin” folder.

3. What is it?

Before you archive or delete any email it is important that you make a decision on what it is. This will help you take the appropriate action.

When you receive an email be sure to ask yourself the question “What is this?”

There are a number of things an email can be.

Trash
An event
Information you may need later
A specific action that you need to take.

Often the information contained in an email will be more than one of these things. That’s ok, the important thing is that you classify it as such in your mind.

4. Take the necessary action

Once you have decided on what the email it is, next you need to take the appropriate action.

Trash - delete it, obviously!

An event - put it into your scheduler or calender along with any accompanying information that may be helpful.

Information that you may need later - archive in the appropriate folder and schedule a reminder to look at it on a later date

A specific action that you need to take - add this to your to-do list. If you don’t have a to-do list, start one!

Note: Don’t use your inbox as your to-do list, it gets too confusing and your to-do’s get lost amongst all the other emails

5. Get your inbox to zero

Once you have taken the necessary action and extracted all the information from the email that you need at that stage, archive it or delete it. Don’t leave it in your inbox.

You should aim to archive or delete all of your emails at least once a day. Getting your inbox to zero at least once a day is one of the most effective productivity tools you can use.

If you begin to put these five steps into practice you will begin to notice that you miss fewer meetings, turn up to class on time and begin to get more out of your day.

What other tips do you have for handling your email effectively? Leave a comment and let us know.