Is your email inbox out of control?
It doesn’t have to be that way.
We’re going to go all “Super Nanny” on your inbox and teach it how to behave.
Once you’ve implemented the strategies in this series, your inbox will be working FOR you, not against you.
You will have relief.
Over the next 7 days we’re going to set up a system that does the work for you so that you can spend less time deleting and sorting emails and more time doing the things you love.
This system will prevent your inbox from becoming a disaster in the future as well.
It’s going to take a little bit of work to get there, but I promise you the time investment will save you hundreds of hours in the future.
We’re going to start with the basics and then move to the golden nuggets, but I promise that the golden nuggets of usefulness at the end will be worth it. So follow along on this 7 part daily series and by next week this time, you’ll be in a really great place with your email.
So let’s jump in and get take control of your email inbox once and for all.
You NEED Gmail
Google’s Gmail email client is the most incredible tool for managing your inbox. You need this.
Yes, NEED.
If you’re not fully convinced by the end of this series that Gmail is the email tool for you, leave me a comment and let me know why. Trust me when I say it’s the absolute best way to manage your emails.
Things to note:
- You can (and should) use your own custom email address and don’t have to use a generic xxxxxxx@gmail.com email address by signing up for Google Apps.
- You can import old emails from your old email client into Gmail so you won’t lose anything or have to work in two different places.
- You can manage multiple email addresses (sending and receiving) from different domains all in one place.
Sign up for a free Google Apps account & transfer your existing emails to Gmail
Note: If you’re already using Gmail, no need to transfer to Google Apps. You’ll be able to do everything I’ll be talking about in this series with Gmail.
Google Apps gives you access to all sorts of Google tools that are useful, but today we’re simply going to focus on emails.
Use Google Apps to set up your custom email address using your domain name. For example, contact@themoderntog.com. Even if you don’t have your own hosting yet, it’s only $10 a year to get your own domain and set up an email address, and it looks SO much more professional, so do it.
Google Apps is free unless you have more than 10 employees using it at your business. Please note that the “free” version is different than the “Google Apps for Business” version that they talk about on their website. The business version is a paid product that is geared towards companies with multiple employees.
Google does a good job of walking you through all the steps of getting your Google Apps account setup, so I’m not going to rehash it here. If you have any problems and simply want to hire someone else to do it, I highly suggest contacting William Bay and he will take care of it for you.
Import your current emails
The first thing you’ll want to do is import all your email from your current email client so that you have a copy of all of it in Gmail. They do a great job of walking you through this, but if you need additional help you can find it about half way down the page here, under “Individual Users / Client Side”.
If you are starting a new email address, you’ll want to set your old email address to forward to the new one. If you are moving an email address you already use with your custom domain, then don’t worry about this step.
Task for Day #1: Get set up with Gmail. I promise you won’t regret it.
Here’s a rundown of what to expect over the next week. Each post goes deeper into the usefulness of Gmail and many build upon the parts before it, so make sure to follow along so that you have everything set up the way you need it to be.
1. Getting Set Up With Gmail (that’s this post!)
2. The Essentials of Gmail
3. Google Labs For Photographers
4. Watch Your Email Organize Itself With Multiple Inboxes
5. Two Big Time-Saving Tips
6. Client Management Made Simple With Boomerang
7. How To Keep Your Email Inbox From Taking Over Ever Again
In the meantime, I’d love to hear what your biggest frustration with email is. Leave a comment below and let it out! Trust me, it feels good. Go ahead.
Click to go to Part 2 of the Series.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
You know, now that I think about it, my biggest problem is actually deleting emails. I save most stuff that isn’t junk, even though I don’t need to. Gmail has a lot of storage but I shouldn’t have so much in my archives. The problem is that there have been many times when I’ve really needed an old email, so I don’t have a great way of knowing what to save and what to trash….
I have that same “problem”, but I actually think there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you are archiving it so it isn’t cluttering up your inbox. I delete very few things, although I do delete a good number of newsletters once I’ve read them (or I label them as keepers to look back at in the future). It’s not just about deleting emails, it’s about getting them out of site, stuffing them in that beautiful hidden drawer called the archives, and then having a system for seeing exactly what you need to see without everything else cluttering up your box.
I’d love to write more, but I’ll go over most of this in the next few days, so I’ll refrain. Thanks for your comment, Jenika!
My biggest email frustration-those emails that are weeks (ok, who am I kidding? Months) old that I haven’t dealt with or don’t want to deal with. Someone else wants me to do something for them that I don’t have time to do, and so it sits and sits, taunting me until it’s buried under so many other emails.
Part 2- is that if I don’t deal with it right away, I completely forget. I know I should archive daily, but some emails I don’t want to lose or they need some action.
Lara, I know exactly what you mean. In fact, I believe I have an email from you that I have intended to check out and respond to that is in the “as soon as I can make time” pile, so I’m glad you can at least empathize.
I will be talking about emails like you mentioned in the second part of your comment and how to handle them so that they aren’t cluttering up your inbox but so that you actually remember to take action on them. So check back in parts 5 & 6 of the series and hopefully it will help you find some relief.
Thanks for the comment! You rock!
Do you have to use Google Apps to do this? I’m using regular gmail but have it set up to display my business (Christine at my domain) email address and pull in that mail.
Can I migrate over to Google Apps from Gmail?
Hi Christine,
It looks like everything that we’ll be using is also available in Gmail (not just Google Apps) so there’s no need to transfer anything. You can migrate over, but from some really quick searching it looks like you would lose any labels that you currently use (see here).
I’m not sure if there’s any real benefit to going to Google Apps, at least for the stuff I’m going to be talking about, so you should be good. Thanks for asking, though, I think I’ll add a note about it in my post above.
Nice to see you around, by the way. Hope things are going well for you!
Hi Jamie & Christine,
I’ve just started using Google Apps so really looking forward to this series to get more out of it.
I use Google Apps over Gmail as I read somewhere that emails sent with Gmail have “sent by (name@mydomain) using Gmail” on them, whereas with Google Apps it just displays your personal domain. I stand to be corrected if I’m wrong on this, but it just seemed a bit more professional not to have the “using Gmail” shown, plus I have the other apps all together in one place.
Good to know, Karl. Thanks for the info. I couldn’t find a good reason anywhere else why a person should switch, so that’s really helpful.
I hope you enjoy the series. The best stuff comes in the last 3 days, so stay tuned and keep checking back to learn the really good stuff.
Karl, I use Gmail all the time – have for years – and there is no “sent by” notice on my emails that go out to people. I looked thoroughly for that before I started using it just to make sure. A little digging shows that I am using Gmail, but I can tell the same about people using Google Apps too.
I wonder if there’s a setting somewhere that can be turned off. Hm. Interesting.
Is it possible to just keep my old email address and continue to forward those emails to Gmail long-term? The thought of changing my email address (I have a tds account with my business name and then @tds.net) makes me cringe. Changing it on business cards, postcards, all the places and people who already have my current email? Not appealing. :/
As for my biggest frustration with email, it’s definitely that I always have way too many in there. Even with different folders for all kinds of categories, finding the time to actually sit down and put them in those folders and delete the junk is difficult and often the first task to go when there are too many tasks on my list. My other frustration is that feeling that “I might need that later”. Especially as photographers, we get so many wonderful resources sent to us every week (including The Modern Tog!) and I always think I might go back to those again (sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t). When I get too busy to sort it properly, my inbox becomes a holding tank for all of these resources I might use again. It’s very frustrating.
Looking forward to following this series of posts (but would love to confirm that I don’t need to change my email address as far as other people are concerned)! Thank you, Jamie!
Hey Kelly,
I just replied to the Facebook comment you left as well, so I won’t repeat it here, but thanks for commenting.
If anyone is looking for my response, it’s up above in the facebook comment section.
This is an amazing, wonderful idea!! You can bet I will be applying and crossing my fingers to be a part of your insiders team…..would love to try this out. I was just gazing with depression at my overwhelmed inbox the other day and wishing there was some long term solution to this time consuming headache. It was partly the thought of all the “extra” time I spend with client emails that convinced me to raise my prices this year since email can suck so much of your time……
Hi Tessa!
I think many people feel frustrated when they think of emails and all the time it takes to manage them. I’ve even heard some bloggers joke than when people ask them what they do, they reply “I delete emails for a living” because it can suck so much time.
I hope you enjoy this series, and watch your inbox next week for more info about the Insider’s Team. I will be releasing it to email followers first before announcing it to everyone else, so you’ll have at least 1 day advance notice to be part of it. Glad to hear you’re excited about it – I think it is going to be super-helpful for people.
Thanks for commenting and following the blog.
Have a lovely weekend!
Hi Jamie,
Thanks so much for the useful information. I wonder if you could help? I am trying to change to GMail but I cannot find how to import emails from Outlook Express.
It’s in this post in the second section under individual users: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57920
Hope that helps! If not, I have no idea and I suggest googling like crazy.
This is a great series of posts on better use of Gmail. Thanks. Could you add hyperlinks the 6th and 7th installments of the article? I would like to share this series with others and would like to point them to the first installment, but the good stuff is really later. It’d be nice to only save the one link.
Thanks!
Oh goodness, I meant to do this way back when and totally forgot about it! Will do it now so you can share it and not worry about it. Thanks for pointing that out!!!!