Email Clutter Is Stealing Your Time. Let’s Fix That.

If you feel like your inbox is always demanding from you, you’re not crazy. Email is one of those sneaky little drains that doesn’t just steal time, it steals attention. And attention is necessary for stewarding a God-shaped dream.

In today’s Habit Series, I’ve invited my friend Christa Hutchins (host of Just One Simple Thing podcast) to share three simple ways to manage your email without turning it into a whole new project. Because when your inbox is a mess, it impacts everything else you’re working on, including the next brave step on your dream.

This is also for the woman who’s building an audience and trying to grow an email list. I know it can feel scary to clean house and remove people who never open your messages. But this habit pays off in the future. It protects your focus, keeps your systems lighter, and helps you lead your dream with more clarity and less constant noise.

If email has been stealing your time and energy, this is a habit worth building today.

Get the Habit Tracker here: merrittonsa.com/habits

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Transcript

Merritt Onsa:
What is something you could do today that would impact your God shaped dream and your ability to persevere in it for the long haul? Hi, I'm Merritt Onsa, your devoted dreamers host, and I am an authority on what it looks like to pursue a God shaped dream. And over the next several mini episodes, I'm going to be talking about building simple, small habits that will build into you confidence and the consistency you need to run your race after the dream God has given you. Let's build some new habits. Is clearing the clutter from your life one of those things that you get really excited about at the beginning of the year or maybe in that like spring cleaning season of the year or maybe as your kids are heading to school at the end of summer?

There's something that feels so good about clearing the clutter from our life. This is a constant thing that we have to keep on top of. And so for this episode today, I wanted to invite my friend, Christa Hutchins to come in and talk about one of the things that she works on every January to kind of reset the foundation for her business and her ministry. Christa's podcast is called Just One Simple Thing. I think you're going to love her quick, short, simple, one doable thing for every podcast episode she puts out. And in today's episode, I wanted to share from her January reset series on the best tips for managing your email inbox. So I encourage you to go listen to the rest of her series, which is so beautifully aligned with my own habit series here, but this biggest time suck as she talks about managing our email, I'm going to let Christa take it away.

Christa Hutchins: 
We need to unload some things and straighten up others. Let's kick off the January Reset series with my best tips for managing email. I'm your host, Christa Hutchins, a project manager, coach, wife, mom, encourager, and friend. In each episode, we tackle a specific issue keeping you stuck as you chase after your God dream and give you just one simple thing to help bring clarity to your swirl of creative ideas.

Now, let's go solve a problem. All this month, we'll work on getting organized, just a little at a time. Think of it as a January reset, opening yourself up and making room for all the new blessings God has for My one word for 2023 is foundations, and I'm determined to shore up some of the foundations in my business. Want to join me?

Each week in January, we'll focus on one area and I'll give you two or three assignments to choose from during the week. See, I'm making it easy with just a few things to choose from. So let's dive right into one of the biggest time sucks we face. Email. I know I just saw all of you roll your eyes. I feel the same way. It may be the easiest way to communicate with some people, but it piles up quickly and can take over our time and our brains. We need to simplify. Here's three tips for managing email and keeping things simple. Two for incoming and one for outgoing. One, review your subscriptions. Scrolling down my inbox, probably close to 80 % of it is some kind of automated email, either because I bought something, signed up for a course or opt in freebie or subscribed to a blog I like.

There's no way I can read or absorb all that, and it stresses me out to see it just sitting there. We know how important email lists are. Most of us with an online presence work hard to build a relationship with our audience using an email list. But honestly, if my email is just going to sit unopened in your inbox, that's not much of a relationship. So I give you permission. Unsubscribe from my list or any other list that's not delivering something you love to your inbox. Even if you still want to hear from all those people, there's some things you can do to take the pressure off your bulging inbox. Unroll.me is a great solution for that. I used Unroll.me years ago and it made a world of difference. Sign up for this free service and they'll scan your inbox to identify all of the automated emails. You can designate the emails from each subscription to continue coming to your inbox, unsubscribe or send them to the trash, or get rolled up into one daily email. Another tip is to use rules to automatically filter your subscriptions. Almost all of those subscriptions have the word unsubscribe near the bottom. So tell your email service to filter everything with the word unsubscribe to a separate subscriptions folder. Just be sure to scan that folder every couple of days to see all the good stuff that's accumulating there.

Number two, clear your inbox. Once you've got the subscriptions under control, now it's time to clear that inbox. Now I admit I am horrible at this. My inbox doubles as my file cabinet and my resource library and a poor imitation of a to-do list. Right at this minute, my personal email has more than 100,000 unread emails. That doesn't even count the ones I've opened, and my business email has a paltry, by comparison, 45,000 total emails. Clearly, I have a problem that I need to tackle. Michael Hyatt has a great method for clearing out the inbox. 

Look at each email and do one of these five things: 

• Do, take action on the task right now. 
• Delegate, pass the task on to someone else. 
• Defer, consciously decide you'll do it later.
• Delete if you don't need it for later send it to the trash. 
• File if you need it for later file it. 

And this piece of advice from Mr. Hyatt set me free: Do not create an elaborate set of file folders This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you just file everything in one folder called process mail or use Gmail's archive function.

If it's more complicated than this, it will lead to procrastination. Trust me on this. You'll have to decide, should I file this under Megan because it's from her or under Stu because it's about him? And then what happens if the email covers more than one subject? Do you make copies of the email and put one copy under each folder? Things can get complicated fast. Forget all of that.

File your email in one folder and let your email or system search function find it when you need it. The search capabilities of almost every modern email program will enable you to put your hands on anything whenever necessary. It may take you a few minutes longer to find the message using this method, but it's offset by the hours you waste trying to figure out how to file your messages. Thank you, Mr. Hyatt. Hallelujah and pass the delete key.

This piece of advice is so true. I'm slowly trying to get to inbox zero using this method. I did create a few key folders for things I know I'll use frequently, but everything else goes in one saved mail folder. Number three, remove your inactive subscribers. I know, I know, you worked hard to get those subscribers on your email list.

But if you have people who've been on your list for over six months and not opened any emails from you in that time, there are several reasons why you need to remove them. One, you are or will be paying for them at some point. Two, Gmail and other email services screen incoming messages to put them in spam or promotions folders. If your email routinely has a low open rate, Google is more likely to put it in spam or promotions. Subscribers who open your emails are, for the most part, the ones who really matter. If you're ready to do this, identify your inactive subscribers and send them an email asking if they want to stay on your list. I bet very few of them will even open it. Then archive the ones who don't respond. A couple of times a year, I do this with everyone who's been on my list for more than six months but hasn't opened any of the last 50 emails. That keeps my email open rates high and my email costs low. So there you go, three ideas for your January reset.

Merritt Onsa: 
Wasn't that so good? Just one simple thing that you can put on your list for tomorrow or this next week to move the needle forward and set yourself up for building a strong foundation for your dream. I also just want to like personally affirm two of the steps that she suggested that I have done in the last year. And I want to let you know how it went. So number one, filter all your newsletters into a separate folder. I have done this and it was amazing at the beginning. I've never experienced inbox zero. And this was the closest I ever got with like, I don't know, 50 messages in my inbox and I have fallen off keeping my inbox clean. So I need to revisit this habit on a more regular basis. And I also need to revisit the effectiveness of the filters I chose. I love what she said about Michael Hyatt's format.

I did it the clunky way and I have way too many folders and I also have some emails that are sneaking through and I've got to figure out what's wrong with my filters, but I highly recommend taking all the clutter and putting it in one separate folder and just starting fresh and working from there. And then the second one that I've done is removing people from my email list who haven't opened an email for me in six months. I was definitely nervous to do this. did it back in July, but I bit the bullet and I removed about a hundred people from my email list.

Not one person has complained. I'm sure they didn't even notice, but when I reached out in advance to give them the heads up, I think there might've been one person, just one who clicked the link saying, ⁓ sorry. I, you know, I meant to stay on the list or whatever. So, and I don't have a huge email list. And so it didn't impact really how much I currently pay for convert kit, my email service, but it will at some point in the future, because when I start getting close to a thousand subscribers, that's when the price goes up. So this was an effort for the future and I think I probably will do it like Christa maybe every six months.

Merritt Onsa: 
I'll sneak in here with a little amendment of 2026. I have continued to sort my email that comes into my own inbox by folders. But the addition that I wanted to update you with at this point in my email sending life is that I still use kit, formerly known as convert kit, mentioned earlier here, but actually have set up an automation.

So if you are someone that has an email list, I'm sure there are other email service providers besides Kit that allow you to do this, but I set up an automation from the point where someone joins my list, if they haven't opened my email for 90 days, they go through a sequence where I send some emails, hey, just checking in. I'm sure you've gotten these, if you're on anybody's email list. Hey, just checking in. Do you want to still stay on the list? You haven't opened an email in this long.

And I just put that on autopilot now, I don't even manually do it. And I know that feels scary to automatically remove people from your list, if you have put a lot of effort into growing an email list, but as Christa said, I totally believe that there's no real value in keeping someone on your list who doesn't open your messages. So this is my update from here in the future, 2026.

I want to leave you with this important note today. You can begin a new habit anytime. And it's important because consistency builds courage and consistency is self-perpetuating. This month I'm asking you to consider one to two small habits that you could begin today that would give you that practice of building that muscle memory. Pick something simple.

Pick something that's easy. Pick something you want to do and something you can do quickly. Pick a habit that has an outcome you would be excited to achieve, to receive, to see that change in your life. Pick your habit, start tracking it, and see what God does with your consistency and perseverance to establish new habits.