The longer you let your inbox pile up, the less likely you are to tackle it. But use the hacks that follow, and you can reach “inbox zero” in almost no time.
(For more efficient ways to improve your life, check out The Better Man Project. You’ll find more than 2,000 tips on how to sharpen your mind, sculpt your abs, seduce your partner, and lead a healthier, more kickass existence.)
Step 1: Purge
If you’re sitting on emails from months ago, odds are you don’t need them anymore, says Marsha Egan, author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence. But then again, you never know, right?
Solution: Move all your messages that didn’t arrive in the last 30 days into a folder—or into a “label,” if you’re using Gmail. If that leaves you with a stack of emails that’s still larger than you want to deal with—like triple digits— continue to adjust the date until your inbox decreases to double or single digits.
Title your folder “Before 8/1/2015” (or your chosen date). This way, you can always dig through your folder if you ever need to access an ancient message.
Related: 10 Things All Busy, Successful Men Do
An easy way to move thousands of emails at once: If you use Outlook, type “received: <08/01/2015” (or your chosen date, in that format) into your inbox search bar. Select all your results—using Command+A on a Mac or Control+A on a PC—and drag them into your folder.
Once you do that, a box should pop up that tells you it’s copying the results into your specified folder. After the messages are copied, go ahead and delete them from your main inbox.
Or in Gmail, type “before: 2015/08/01” into your search bar. Click the “select all” box. At the top of the page, you’ll see the option to “Select all conversations that match this search.”
Click that option, drop your emails into your folder, and then click “Archive” to clear your emails out of your inbox.
Step 2: Stash or Trash
Now that your pile is more manageable, start sifting through it. Delete anything you don’t need—which may be the bulk of your inbox if you get a lot of marketing emails or social media notifications.
For any emails that you need to handle, follow the 2-minute rule: If you can take care of it in 2 minutes or less, do it now. Put any emails that will take longer than that in a separate “to do” folder for when you have time.
Related: 10 Ways to Boost Your Productivity at Work
Step 3: Avoid a Future Pile-Up
Now that your inbox is cleared out, take these steps to keep it that way.
Unsubscribe from all your unwanted notifications at once with the free service Unroll.Me. It’ll show you every email list you’re signed up for—one Men’s Health editor was shocked to see she had 144!—and allow you to check off the ones you don’t want to receive anymore.
Then, as new emails roll in, continue deleting what you don’t need right away and using the 2-minute rule to manage everything else. Set a daily reminder for yourself to check and take care of your “to do” folder, says Egan.