Our email’s inbox can be a scary place with an insane amount of unopened emails. I don’t know about everyone else, but when my email is cluttered and full of notifications, I miss important notices, dates and pieces of information. In times like this, it is more important than ever to stay on top of things. The start of maintaining a nice and efficient inbox can be a little overwhelming if your notifications have reached over 1,000, like mine did. It was almost like it was too far unorganized to fix, but of course it wasn’t. After I took the time to clear the mess, it was so much better and easier to navigate. My stress levels may have even decreased because the 1,000+ notification bubble was not haunting me anymore.

Tip 1: Overcome

For starters, if you have an email that is already filled with spam and unopened emails—you have to overcome the impossible and go through them all. There are likely many junk emails from the same sender and, in this case, you can search the sender’s name and delete them all at one time rather than going through them individually. You can also look for past semester professors or go to a certain date and delete things past then. When doing this, take the time to make sure you aren’t deleting updates from the university or anything else that may be valuable information. In the event that you do delete something and regret it, you can regain access to it in the “Trash” folder of Gmail.

Tip 2: Unsubscribe

With the promotional and spam emails that you subscribed to long ago, it is imperative to unsubscribe from them, so they won’t clutter your inbox in the future. There is usually an unsubscribe button at the very bottom of the email in tiny print. It will likely ask your preference of subscription or survey why you’re unsubscribing. You don’t have to be too nice here and can unsubscribe completely if it’s not important.

Tip 3: Maintain

Now looking forward, it is easiest to keep your inbox decluttered if you stay on top of it! By this, I mean going through the inbox weekly or even daily and deleting the emails that are junk. When you are signing up for promotions, discounts, programs, etc., do not use your Texas A&M email unless it’s school-related. It is smart to have a separate email for non-academic purposes, so you don’t fill your Texas A&M email with other random things. This will likely prevent junk emails entirely!

Tip 4: Notifications

I recommend keeping your notifications on for your emails, especially since classes are online and sometimes asynchronous. This may be the only way your professor can contact you and deliver information. When a notification comes up, or when you see it, it is best to open it and decide if it’s useful information or junk. Likewise, if you know it is something you’ll want to go back to, star it so it’s more easily accessible.

Canvas & Blackboard

The same tips and concepts apply with the notifications and messages we receive on these platforms. I recommend getting the app for Blackboard and Canvas! The app will send notifications when assignments are graded and even when things are coming up or past due, if you set it up to. Don’t worry though, you can set notification preferences if you don’t want to see all this information as a notification on your phone.

Hopefully, these ideas can be useful and help you declutter your email and get those annoying notification numbers down!

Thanks & Gig ‘Em