E-Mail Filters
Make the dig-out permanent so the flood never comes back.
Make It Permanent
Last week we declared email bankruptcy, so you’re down to a couple thousand unread instead of fifty thousand. This week we make it stick, so the flood never comes back. The tool is filters, and they’re way less scary than they sound.
- Understand what a filter does. It reads a rule you write, then acts. “Anything that says unsubscribe, drop in a folder.” “Anything from Target, drop in a folder.” You never see it unless you go looking. There’s a QR with how-to videos for every platform.
- Or pay a tool to do it for you. Three favorites: unroll.me, sanebox.com, and trimbox.com. Trimbox is Gmail-only, but it puts a little icon you can smash over and over to unsubscribe from thousands. Nothing more cathartic. Unroll.me and SaneBox cost a little and are genuinely smart about managing the flow.
- Cloze users, you’re already done. Go to email at the top, click All Email, then Focus. There’s your filtered inbox, handled for you.
This is not as hard as we make it, and you’ll feel better the second it’s set up.
Your assignment this week: Set up one filter, or turn on one of the tools. Either way, stop the flood at the source.
Transcript
So last week we did the email reset or the email bankruptcy as I call it and you're probably only up to a couple thousand unread emails now. So this week we're going to talk about making it completely permanent. Hi, I'm Kyle and this is Tool Time. So here's the plan.
We have a couple thousand emails that are coming in every single day. You can just watch the emails just constantly pinging and buzzing your phone or your watch or whatever constantly. But there's a few ways we can fix that. They're called filters and they're not nearly as complicated as they sound.
There are three ways that you can do a filter inside of each one of your platforms that will make all of your lives easier. I've got a little QR code that you can scan to a video of all the different ways you could do a filter for all the different platforms that you'd want to do. A filter is easy. All it does is it reads some rules that we write and then does what we want it to do.
So it can read say anything that says unsubscribe on an email, put it in a folder. Anything that's from this particular sender like target, put it in a folder. So you never actually see it unless you really, really want to. Now I'm sure there's some people out there who are either power users or who don't want to do any of that.
And I've got some suggestions for you. There are a bunch of people who have built tools that will gladly take your money to organize your unsubscribe and organize your email. My three favorites are unroll.me, sanebox.com, and then trimbox.com. Trimbox only works for Gmail, but it's my favorite just because it puts a nice little icon that you can just smash over and over and over again, unsubscribing from thousands of emails.
There's really nothing more cathartic than that. The nice thing about unroll.me and sanebox is while you do pay for them, they are really intelligent and they help a lot. They take care of all of the unsubscribing and all of the managing for your email specifically. I'll have little demo videos and links to both of them at the QR code before, and I'm sure it's probably here now.
Anyway, this isn't nearly as complicated or hard as we make it, and I promise you'll feel better once we get it set up. Oh, and by the way, if you're a closed user, this is already done for you. Go to your email at the top, click the all email, and then just go to focus. And then there it is.
Your filtered inbox already done for you. Anyways, that's it for this week. Hope you have a great one. We'll talk to you next time.
Thanks so much.