How to Manage Your Email Inbox

We've all become very dependent on our email inboxes in this digital age. And, depending on your profession or where you are in life - such as working on a health care degree - it often appears that it doesn't take much for that inbox to become overwhelming. Messages stack up quickly. It gets more and more difficult to tell which messages are more important and must be tended to quickly.

We know life can become hectic for our Concorde students. Working toward a health care degree or diploma takes astute organizational skills. Organizing and optimizing one's email inbox can be a big step toward organizing your entire life.

Deborah Sweeney, a West Coast CEO who knows small business and entrepreneurs as well as students seeking health care degrees, recently outlined five easy organization tips for your email inbox in Forbes magazine. If you're a Concorde student seeking a health care degree in nursing, dental hygiene, physical therapist assistant or surgical technologist, you might want to follow these. They could greatly simplify your lives!

5 easy organization tips for your email inbox

1. Categorize everything. Papers, exams, lab work. Underneath parent categories like these, you can break down into smaller, sub categories which include individual assignments or other requirements. Begin filing messages into each category as soon as they are addressed.
2. Learn to delete. File the emails you need. The ones you don't? Delete. You don't need to make like a pack rat when it comes to every online newsletter or witty exchange you and your co-workers have made throughout the day. If you're on the fence about keeping an email, file it.
3. Respond quickly. Keeping messages in your inbox for too long that you haven't addressed or are delaying a response to only lends to the question... are you or aren't you planning on replying back?
4. Make your subject lines just as organized. Skip using vague headers like "article" or "important" and assign the header a concise subject. This will make it easier to find the email you're looking for and help it stand out from the crowd.
5. Set aside time to organize. No matter how you cut it, keeping an email inbox organized is going to be a time-consuming practice. It should save you time in the long run, however. So set aside a pocket of time to really get down to the business of creating your folder categories, organizing contact names and information and deleting old messages.

Helping you pursue your health care degree or diploma

Take a little bit of time each and every day to whittle down that message number. It will make it much easier to begin the next day and discern what messages are most urgent and need your attention. An organized student is a happy and successful student. You'll be much more ready to get to work on what you need to work on most... until that inbox fills back up again, that is.