Your email inbox is certainly in the “top ten” stressors of your digital world. Piles of newsletters pile up in there, making it difficult to know which of the many emails needs to be answered and when. Even worse, all the ads in your inbox keep you from getting the important stuff done quickly without having to spend another two hours on an online retailer’s website because they’ve sent you yet another whopping discount code via newsletter that’s imperative to redeem by tomorrow … Of course, you weren’t planning on ordering anything from the retailer, but hey, you can’t pass up a good offer like that.
Last but not least, your personal email accounts are often the ones that reveal important data about you, because they are used for calendar functions, contacts and many other purposes. Therefore, you should not carelessly disclose your emails everywhere, but proceed systematically here as well. As you can see, the topic is quite extensive and requires some care in handling … so let’s get started!
Differentiate which email account you use for each purpose
In the first step, you should decide which email account you use professionally, e.g. as an employee or freelancer. You need to protect this account particularly well, because it is often used to harm your company financially. For example, a hacker can trick you into clicking on links that install malware on your machine in order to obtain more sensitive information (such as account or customer data). Therefore, be especially sensitive and use your professional email only for your direct work activities and not for any other service like social media accounts ( also LinkedIn is social media… ). And if you want to download whitepapers or similar, don’t just give away your professional email, but use “one-way email” services (like “temp-mail.org”, or others) to generate a temporary email address, which is only used to avoid being tricked into using your professional email for requests where it is just a single sending of material or similar.
For your personal email accounts, you can be a little more liberal about sharing those email addresses. However, again, the more an email is used for financial or any other critical services, such as healthcare, the more cautious you should be about disclosing that email.
Outside of my professional life, I will therefore use the following categories for my email accounts:
- “Contracts”: for contacts where I have no professional relationship, but are managed through a wide variety of contracts (electricity, insurance, etc.)
- “serious private”: for contacts where I do not have a professional relationship and do not yet enter into a contract, but where at least my real name is known (for job applications, inquiries at public agencies, keeping in touch digitally with existing loose contacts outside of social media and messenger services).
- “Social Media”: one email account per social media platform, which helps me to separate social media accounts more easily and also to access the content of the platforms only selectively … If you have little social media affinity, you can also use a single email address for all your social media accounts, but here you need a special focus on the security of this account.
- “Newsletter”: Email account for all sorts of newsletters, which I replicate only once a week if possible, to keep me informed about news from my favorite blogs, or content from other interesting websites.
- “Calendar”: Email account for synchronization of all my calendar appointments.
Set synchronization events per email account
Surely you already use an email client for your email on your computer and maybe on all your other mobile devices… If not, it’s about time, because this way you have all your email accounts at your fingertips in one place and can control them all together from one interface.
However, the danger is that you prioritize the emails that come in from “unimportant” accounts more than you should because everything is equally weighted next to each other. Therefore, please synchronize your accounts at different intervals depending on their importance, so that you are less often confronted with new newsletters than with messages from your bank.
I have the following synchronization schedules for my accounts:
- “Contracts” , “serious private” and “calendar” are replicated directly, so I’m always up to date on when I find time to sift through my emails (which you shouldn’t do more than three times a day if you want to still have a life apart from emails 😉
- “Social media and newsletters replicate once a week for me. I then take a look at the weekend to see if there was anything exciting or inspiring. The charm of this method is that you miss some ” limited promotional offers” because unfortunately the promotional period has expired. But at least this way you won’t be tempted to buy some nonsense just because you get a 15% discount for it … The same goes for social media, though it’s less about limited promotional offers and more about quickly commenting on trending topics. If you use social media professionally (such as Instagram as a sales platform, which I think is its main purpose), treat those accounts with appropriate priority as well and replicate them more often. However, be especially careful here not to let your professional goals on the platform stop you from browsing too much without any added value.
Syncing is also the keyword if you have your emails set up on your mobile devices as well. If possible, do this only with the accounts you sync daily rather than, say, social media and newsletter accounts. This will help you stop looking into your emails so much out of reflex, because all the colorful newsletter messages and social media updates won’t come through to you directly.
This will reduce your wasted email time by at least 50%, and it may also help you to be a bit more critical about which emails to look at and when, and which social media accounts and newsletters add any value at all and which ones you should safely unsubscribe from.
For the pros: set up your own email hosting and email forwarding
Working with different email accounts for different topics also helps you to delete email accounts that are full of spam and have little interesting content without having a guilty conscience. But if you are tired of having to reconfigure your email client over and over again, you can also use a central account to which you forward all your other emails. This also has the charm that you don’t have to reveal this email and therefore this mail is very resistant against spam mails. Of course it gets forwarded spam, but you can keep this well in check by deleting especially newsletter and social media email accounts on a regular basis. Likewise, it helps to “audit” emails that you receive from your “contract” email account, for example. Because the email provider, where the account is running, might get full at some point and not be able to archive new emails anymore (as already happened once to me …). Then you can safely collect important emails that you need to keep in a central place and create a new account for your contracts and shut down the old one over time. Of course you have to be careful that this account doesn’t get too full. You can also set it up so that emails from your newsletter and social media account are not archived, but only those emails that come from the “Contracts” account.
The only important thing is that you should not forward any professional emails to your private email account, especially if you are an employee, because these are not your personal emails, but emails that belong to your employer and can be used against you in case of doubt… Of course, you can and should archive things that only concern you, such as remuneration or expense reports privately, but never sensitive contract documents or customer communication!
And now, good luck with your email system and your newfound time you don’t have to spend browsing newsletters or social media posts!
Checklist:
- Identify used email accounts
- Set categories for email accounts
- Create email account(s) per category
- Check usage of old email accounts and add new email address to “category alien” accounts if necessary
- Set up synchronization times per email account and set them up in your email client
- Unregister all distracting email accounts from email clients of all your mobile devices