The Best Email System for Busy Moms

hello and welcome back to a happier home where we are going to clear up some major mental space clutter today okay this is a very exciting one I did not see this one coming actually because I didn't really have it on my radar it wasn't really on my list of videos I wanted to do but then it became an emergency situation over here it was out of control and it was seriously cluttering up so much of my my brain space that I was like I really got to fix this so I spent some time putting some new systems in for my email inbox and it has added so it like made my life it made my day yesterday I went through it and I figured it out and I got rid of all the Clutter and I got rid of all these subscriptions and just I can't tell you how good it felt okay but I will I'm going to tell you right now and I'm going to tell you how to do it because I want you guys to get a hold of your email inbox okay it's one of those stupid little things that it's a part of life we got to deal with it but it's like no one teaches you how to deal with these things our moms didn't have to deal with it our grandmas didn't have to deal with it but we're to figure it out and make it a nonissue in our lives anymore okay if you haven't been here before hi I'm Tara I am your mommy Mentor I'm going to help you get through your motherhood Journey with some better home systems so that we can systemize the worky part of being a mom and have more fun doing the fun part of being a mom and and that's all I need to say about that I could go on and on about systems guys but we're here to learn how to manage our emails our mom emails okay so let's do it and today we are working with Gmail but I'm sure a lot of of these systems will work for other email platforms if you use something else and yeah just remember that implementing a new system is going to take some time to set it up on the front end but if you take some time to do that it is going to help you with your weeks and your months and your years to come so like I said it'll probably take you like 30 minutes to do this and then you're going to have it for life okay so for the first step we're going to purge our email we don't want any more coming into our email then we can handle and so we're going to unsubscribe to anything we don't want anymore okay and how are we going to do this people have already set it up for us it's called unroll.me unroll.me is an amazing free tool that you hook up to your Gmail you just type in your Gmail and you kind of have to like go through some security questions and things like that but once you get in it's going to show you a huge list of all the things that you're getting in your inbox and you can choose whether to keep it whether to unsubscribe or put it in your rollup which is kind of like they package it all in one so you get kind of like one email that has all the newsletters you want instead of getting an individual one per thing and hon ly there's a lot more to un roll. me that I don't know and so I'm going to put in the description a blog post that can explain it all to you better than I can after we've purged a little bit all the things that have our name on their lists we want to consolidate all any other inboxes that we have so if you have multiple emails you're going to go you're going to choose one okay we kind of just want one inbox that we look at honestly I can understand if you want more than one like if you have a business obviously that has your business stuff and then your personal stuff that's fine but if you have like old emails that you keep having to check on go to those emails and forward you can set up in the settings forward those emails to the one email that you want to be checking most okay we don't want to be having to click through or be swapping accounts all the time on our phones to see those emails we are minimizing the work here and minimizing the steps all right so now we're going to jump into Gmail and I'm going to show you what what we're going to do so since I already decluttered my email this one looks a little bit nice but believe me I had probably 200 emails in my inbox that I had to sort through so what we're going to do now is we're going to set up some labels and many of you might have some really old labels that you set up many years ago for younger kids or whatever we want to get rid of any labels we don't need anymore update ones that need updating um and add new ones so go through your labels and figure out what you want to keep what you want to throw and then I'm going to tell you which ones to add this might take some time as you're going to want to go through those old labels and folders and figure out what you want to keep or not what I learned in this process which I don't know how I didn't know this before but you're going to you can archive emails and it does doesn't delete them it just kind of gets them out of your way you can still search and find them you can still search and find them according to what label is on them um but that was news to me that you could archive maybe everyone knows that but I was left behind okay so here's my Gmail account and this is how we're going to set it up to look for you guys today we're going to have our inbox we're going to have these other separate folders on the side so you can see what you actually want to keep but for the most part we want our inbox to be totally clear a lot of times I would like to keep things in my inbox as reminders no more our inbox should be a trigger to show us that we need to go through it so if we see something in it that's going to alert us to say that needs attention Okay so now that we have our personal labels figured out we're going to make some more labels and you can see them right here we're going to make a follow-up a read me and a waiting response label we do that by just clicking the plus sign and you're going to want to write followup but you want to put these brackets this's one video I I watched to put brackets so that it takes it to the top of your list so it doesn't get muddled up in your other labels so we're going to write followup and bracket okay and that's all we're going to do then we're going to click create and you'll do the same thing for a read me label and for a waiting response label just click that plus sign write it in add those brackets if you want if not that's fine too it's probably just going to alphabetize it on the left so that you will find it there um and that's it we're going to add those three you can also make it color coded if that's your jam we're going to click those three buttons on the side and we can label color it and choose any color you want now you've got these labels follow me follow up read me and waiting response so whenever we have incoming emails we are going to put these emails either in one of these folders or we're going to delete it or archive it okay we we want to see everything coming in we're going to look at it give it a label and then move it out of our inbox most of them might go in one of these three folders or into your other family labels that you have so if you look at my inbox I have my main inbox which has three emails that I need to get to and then I have these other three on the right follow-up read me and waiting response right here ready for me to manage how do we do that we're going to go over to this gear button going to scroll all the way down to multiple inboxes and we're going to customize we want to add these three sections okay so you're going to write label colon and then you want to have the exact label written out next to it so you're going to want to add the brackets and then you're going to give it like an easy name right here followup is what I'm going to call it and before we hit save we are going to come right here to the multiple inbox position I like to put it to the right of the inbox um that's just kind of what looks good for me but you can experiment with the above above the inbox or below the inbox too um but for now I'm just going to click right of right of the Inbox and click save changes okay and so then you'll see it you'll see these three folders right next to your main inbox and you can toggle them down or up if you don't want to see it okay so now we've kind of set up the beginning of our system but now we actually need to get some habits into managing this system because it's not going to take care of itself this is up to you to maintain the system so what is it so in my system builder I have four things that every functioning really good system will have that's a goal a location a trigger and steps to fulfill that system so our goal is to keep an organized inbox and to respond to anything that we need to in a timely manner and also just just to be happier okay we want to be less stressed about our email and this is definitely going to do that for us our location we just built we built those labels we organized our inbox and we now know where anything that comes into our inbox is going to be living after we go through it a trigger we need a trigger to remind us to do this system to get it going and to get it started this can either be seeing something in your inbox which honestly having anything in our inbox should be a trigger of like oh I got to get in there and clean it out but that's like all the time honestly I'm getting emails constantly all day long and I don't want to be in my email all day long so I would just suggest setting a couple days maybe like two days a week where you go through your whole inbox okay you can look at it and make sure that there's nothing critical that you need to be looking at like right then um but for the most part we don't want to be in our phones on our emails all day long okay we don't need to do that we're not about that life so pick a couple days maybe that's like Monday mornings and Thursday mornings or maybe it's like I don't know whatever day works for you choose a day and the day itself is going to be the trigger for you to start your email wash out one thing you can do is set a timer on your phone just to remind you uh that that is the time you will take to go through your email and honestly once you've been consistently going through your email it's not going to take that long it's going to take you 10 minutes okay now the steps are kind of an important part because we want to make this a habit of getting through our inbox in a timely manner without all that brain fuzz so that we can know what we're doing and know who we're waiting to hear back from or need to respond to and all that jazz what we're going to do is act on every email as soon as possible okay we made these labels so that we can act on emails as soon as we can right but that doesn't always mean right away we need to follow the one minute rule okay when you see your email you're going through your email and you see one if you can respond if you can get through that email and either respond or archive it or delete it within one minute do it okay don't just let it sit get it done check it off your list one minute rule anything else we've got some options okay so our options are to read and respond right then and then label it and archive it or label it to read later that's what our folder is for okay when the one that says read me if you get an email and uh you can't read it right now but you know you need to read through it but it doesn't necessarily need a response put it in your read me so that you can get to it later our other option is to label follow-up that's my follow-up folder that's going to be things that I know I need to actually sit down and respond to or think about read through and respond to those are things that are going to take maybe a little bit more time right that's going to be our follow-up folder the other action that we can do when we're going through our emails is we need to add it to our add it to our calendar a lot of things with appointments or schedules or whatever A lot of times they have calendar links and you can add it right to your Google calendar right so those are some actions we're going to respond right away get it out of here we're going to put it in our read me folder so we can read it later it doesn't really need a response but we need to look at it we're going to put in our follow-up folder so yes it needs attention but I don't have time right now I'm going to get to it as soon as I can follow-up folder or we're going to add it to our calendar and get it out of the way I really want to make sure we remember those calendar ones because that's a huge part of our home flow is these emails coming in they've got calendar items if we can right here connect from our email to our calendar ooh that's going to save us so much time and energy and just like memory mental load and so remember if you label something and archive it it is still in your system you can still find it it's just not going to be visible right so you label it and then you remember o what was that receipt for this or what was the time for this game or wow that was a whole year ago but I remember I labeled it as this you can still search it and it's still going to be there okay but do that sparingly make sure you're deleting those things that you really honestly don't need anymore okay and that's it guys that's your new email system and now we're going to sit down take some time to really figure out when we can sit down have a moment to clear out our email inbox maybe that's right now go and do your email if you have a couple minutes set up these systems redo your labels delete all and everything relabel it archive it get it out of here okay go to unroll.me unsubscribe from all the crap that keeps coming into your email and filter that out we don't need it we don't need those ads anymore we don't need Old Navy we don't need uh Stitch fix emails coming in anymore we'll go to them if we need them okay we we have enough ads everywhere else we don't need it in our inbox so go do that spend a couple minutes and let me tell you it's going to feel amazing it's one of those things where it's like I did not know how much this was affective me until I fixed it and now you can just breathe a little bit more it's just one less thing that you need to deal with right also if you want any other this the email the extra emails on the side the extra buckets on the side you can add whatever you want maybe you do want a bucket that has all of your school emails and you want to be able to go to them right away do that make it your own customize it to fit whatever you need a lot of people have different types of emails maybe you've got medical bills coming in or you've got information coming in from different schools multiple schools right this is your filing cabinet and you need to make those files that fit your needs okay and there are so many ways you could do this you can color code it you can do whatever you want this is could be not as stressful as it seems right and honestly this is going to be an amazing domino effect on everything else like I said with the calendars if you can figure out your email and just get that habit of adding it to your calendar right away that's going to help your calendar system which is going to help your whole family flow this is going to be a huge domino effect on the rest of your home management I promise anyway I hope this video was helpful for you give it a like and a follow if you guys think that these types of systems can help you in your family life and in your home because I know they sure help me as a mom to five I just can't wing it anymore I need these systems to keep me going and to keep us less frazzled during our weeks and months of life here in this house so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time bye