According to Statista, 376 billion emails are sent per day in 2025. Emails can pile up quickly, and before you know it, your inbox becomes a mess. Keeping it under control helps you stay organized and professional.
Treat your inbox as a simple to-do list and regularly file or delete messages so it always reflects an accurate record of your work.
Figure: Don't let your inbox become a vortex of doom - keep it organized!
Note: Remember that emails are legal records and should be kept with care. Never permanently delete them, as they may be needed to confirm agreements, decisions, or conversations.
Your inbox should be a task list and should be kept clean. When cleaning up their inbox people tend to go from top to bottom. A better way to do it is to search for a specific topic and clean up all related emails .
There are many types of emails which you receive but will never actually reply to. For example, a client may email "Sounds great - please go ahead." These kinds of emails should be kept as a reference for the future.
If someone asks you to perform a task by email, don't reply "OK, I will do that" or fail to reply at all. Instead, do the task and reply "Done" when the task has been completed, and then delete the email. This way the person requesting the task knows that it has been done, and doesn't waste time following you up.
The most dangerous time in a task's life cycle is in a handover. This is the most likely time for a misunderstanding to occur leading to a task getting lost and not being completed.
Always make sure you clearly reallocate a task with an email to the person who will complete the task.
OK - so now you've got your important emails identified, don't let them get lost in the quagmire. If you use Outlook make use of its inbuilt functionality. Always sort your emails by the Received, but add a secondary sort by "Important". This way your important emails always stay at the top to haunt you until they are done.
In your inbox, it's a good idea to reduce noise by giving more attention to emails where you're on the "To" field, and dim the ones you're CC'd on.
You should never empty your Sent Items folder. This folder will in most cases be the only record you have of the emails you have sent to customers and clients.
You may be involved in different tasks simultaneously every day. The best way to organize your tasks and follow each task individually is grouping your emails by conversation. By default, Outlook sorts the emails by Date.
Sometimes you get the same task from 2 different people. Sometimes even the same person sends over-lapping emails. Sometimes you find duplicated PBIs.
Whether you keep a backlog or are just using your email inbox as a to-do list, you have a choice to make:
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