Create a Reply To Folder For Work

In this video, I'll tell you why you really need a "Respond To" email folder for work.

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Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll tell you why you really need a "Respond To" email folder for work.

If you are like me, you probably receive emails from work on your phone. You also get your personal emails on your phone. I have 2 additional email addresses -- one for school and one for this YouTube channel, so instead of flipping back and forth between my four inboxes, I make use of the All Inboxes function on the iPhone. This is great -- EXCEPT -- I really try to get to inbox zero one time per day. That means that once per day I totally clean out my inbox by deleting emails, filing them, or acting on them -- or if the task is longer than 5m -- putting it on my task list.

The issue is this -- when I get a work email that I need to act on -- I don't want to do that during my home time. BUT it bugs me that it is sitting in my inbox taking up space. Particularly when I have to work around a bunch of work emails when I'm trying to get my inbox to zero. This may not be such a big deal during the week -- after all, I'm going to be in the office the next morning and I can take care of those emails then. But on the weekends, I do not love work emails cluttering up my inbox.

SO -- here's what I did. I created a "Respond To" folder. All of my organizations are now using Gmail, so I'll quickly review how to create a folder there, but this is fairly easy with Outlook or any other mail system. I'll go to Gmail on a browser and hit "More" if it isn't showing me all of the folders -- Gmail is trying to force us to call these labels, but I still think of them as folders. Okay -- now click on "Create new label". I'm going to call this Respond To, but I want it to come up higher in the list, so I put an asterix in front of it.

Okay -- so now if I get a work email either at the end of the day or during non-work hours, I file it in this "*Respond To" folder. Then the next time I'm at work, my inbox should be totally clean, but the first thing I need to do is go through this folder and follow up on, answer, or create a task from each of these emails. It keeps my phone inbox clean, I still get to me to see work emails that might be urgent, but it allows me to keep the less urgent ones out of sight and out of mind.

Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!