Creativity needs space to get energy flowing and ideas churning. When you’re in the floral-design zone, you become one with the process and materials, producing beautiful results.

While we’d all love to be in our field of genius all day, every day, running a business involves a number of administrative tasks to keep clients happy and revenue rolling in.

One necessary evil is inbox management. From fielding inquiries and tracking shipments to answering client questions and communicating internally, it’s easy for your emails to get out of hand.

When they do, it creates stress and clutter that impede your magical creative flow. It also means you may be dropping the ball for your clients or colleagues.

Of course, nobody goes into business to sift through emails for hours on end. You’re here for the blooms—not the never-ending bcc’s!

When you implement smart strategies that keep your emails organized and your brain free to ideate, you will increase productivity, find more inspiration, prioritize creativity, and meet your clients’ expectations—all by doing less in your inbox.

Let’s get started.

Start with your filing system

Oh, you don’t have one? Or you have one that you created five years ago and it’s now irrelevant? No problem. It’s never too late to get organized!

A streamlined filing system forms the foundation of a successful email strategy. After all, all of those emails cluttering your inbox need somewhere to go! How you set it up will depend on your personal preferences.

Some people prefer having top-level folders broken down by year, whereas others choose to categorize by operations (i.e., client work, marketing, HR, etc.).

Either way, those categories can then be broken down into subfolders (like client-specific folders) to organize your emails further.

Detox your inbox

Creating a folder hierarchy is fundamental, but the heavy lifting is actually in filing your emails. Depending on how wild your inbox has become, this could take anywhere from half an hour to a half-day. Break it up into time blocks if necessary.

Start by deleting anything and everything that is no longer useful or relevant. Take advantage of the search bar for this step—if you’re subscribed to junk you never read, search the sender and batch delete them all at once. (Just remember to open one of them to unsubscribe for good!)

Then, when your inbox is left only with emails you want to keep, start filing them away in your new folder system. (You can use the search bar and batch file, as well!)

For those looking to unsubscribe from mass email lists, unroll.me is a free app that will allow you to declutter your inbox in just seconds.

Keep your inbox clean and active

An inbox isn’t for storage—that’s what your folders are for! Everything else should be directly related to the projects you are actively working on at the moment: emails that need responses or follow-ups and emails that have important information you need on hand.

Once an email has been addressed, file it away! It’s not disappearing into the internet; it’s still in your account and easy to find with the search bar. Your inbox should serve as a to-do list of action items that need to be top-of-mind; anything else can be saved elsewhere.

Establish an email workflow

Living in your inbox during every waking hour is exhausting and, frankly, unnecessary. Most of those emails don’t need an instant response, so give yourself permission to take a step back. Set aside a block of time every day for replying and cleaning up all of your emails.

Perhaps it’s an hour in the morning after you’ve knocked out the rest of your housekeeping tasks. Or, maybe you take 30 minutes to sift through your inbox during lunch and another 30 minutes before heading out the door. Find a time that feels comfortable in your schedule without letting it go too long before addressing your emails.

If you follow all of these steps, you will end up with an inbox that is lean, efficient, and easy to manage day-to-day. It doesn’t have to become the monster in the corner of the room, reminding you about unanswered emails when you’re hands-deep in greenery (or worse, trying to sleep at night!).

Your inbox should be a tool rather than a burden. With a bit of time invested up front, you can rid yourself of the overwhelm that comes with a bloated inbox.

Photo Credit: Design by Brasada Ranch; Victoria Carlson Photography