Tame Your Inbox & Boost Your Productivity
December 2, 2025
Feeling overwhelmed by email? Learn how to archive, organize, and crush 'inbox zero' in time for this holiday season.
It's your weekly dose of clarity and insight on all things tech & business from Dream in Digital! Each week, I'm here to share my thoughts to help you make the most of today's technology and build a business that genuinely supports the life you want to live.
This Week’s Core Focus:
Taming Your Email Inbox
With the holiday season in full swing now, your inbox may be filling up left and right with promotional messages, work tasks, and miscellaneous to-do’s. The noise level of communications is at its peak, and that means distractions are all around. Staying productive in a world full of noise is hard, but here are some tips to help you keep that primary form of communication intact, so you can stay focused and productive during any season…
Manage Your Subscriptions: Every time you subscribe to something, you’re giving that person or brand access to your inbox - aka, your (sacred) communication space! That means that A) you need to be intentional with what you subscribe to, and B) make sure you unsubscribe from things that don’t serve you anymore! Less subscriptions means less clutter, and less clutter leads to you being more productive! (Check out this week’s bonus tech tip below for a trick to manage all of your Gmail subscriptions from one place!)
Schedule Dedicated Communication Time: Getting pinged throughout the day is no way to get any work done. Put those notifications on silent, and then check your inbox and other communication channels at set blocks of time during the day. Slots in the early afternoon (or whenever you finish your most important task or two), and before you close down for the day are normally go-to times for inbox review. This allows you to efficiently catch up on communications, and take some dedicated time to organize your inbox to relieve some of the clutter that piles up throughout the day.
Use Labels & Filters: My number one tip for keeping your inbox clean: ARCHIVE YOUR EMAILS! It honestly took me way too long to learn about the importance of archiving emails, but it has been a life changer! One of the issues that can come up when you archive emails however is that you may not be able to find it if you need to reference it later. That’s where Labels & Filters come in handy. Use labels to organize & sort archived emails for quick access, and even take things a step further by using Filters to automatically sort and archive emails that you can check out later. (Ex. competitor emails for research, website form fill notifications, etc.) Check out this week’s tech tip to learn all about how to create Labels & Filters so you can tame your inbox like a pro!
Tech Tip of the Week:
Leveling Up Your Inbox Game with Labels & Filters
The Problem: You want to keep your inbox clean and strive for inbox zero, but you want to keep things organized so you don’t lose important messages.
The Solution: Create a Labels structure that allows you to archive the emails that aren’t a priority anymore, but that also allows you to keep them handy for quick access, if you ever need to reference them in the future.
Step 1: Open up your Gmail menu and find the “+” button to the right of the “Labels” section.
Step 2: Simply create the name of your label where you want to store your emails, or use the “Nest label under:” option to create or add your new label to a “parent label” for an even more organized setup.
Step 3: Drag-and-drop any emails from your inbox into that label, and boom, they’re automatically archived and organized!
Want to have Gmail do this organizing for you? Simply create an email Filter!
Step 1: Head to the settings gear in the top right corner of Gmail and click the “See all settings” option.
Step 2: Navigate to the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab and click “Create a new filter” to open up the filters panel
Step 3: Input your filter’s parameters (I normally look at the From Name or From Address for an email to help the filter properly identify the emails I want to filter), and then click “Create filter” to finalize your filter.
Bonus Tip: You can also create filters quickly by opening an email you want filtered, clicking the kebab menu, and then selecting the “Filter messages like these” option.
How This Helps: These two tips help you keep your inbox organized, but they also make sure you always know where all of your messages are, so you can quickly access them when you need to!
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Bonus Tech Tip: Did you know that Gmail is rolling out a feature that lets you manage all of your email’s subscriptions in one place? Simply head to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#sub or find the “Manage subscriptions” option in your Gmail menu:
From here, you can see all of the mailing lists you’re subscribed to, and unsubscribe from lists that don’t serve you anymore!