SAN ANTONIO — Getting organized can be overwhelming but not when you have a week to do it. Take our weekly challenge to tidy up and take charge of your finances. A local advisor shares how getting an efficient email system can help you in the long-run.
FIRST CHALLENGE: ORGANIZE YOUR EMAIL
For the next three weeks on EyeWitness News Tuesday at 6, there will be a new challenge for you to tackle. There will be one per week. The first, is to get your inbox in order. Karl Eggerss, CAPTRUST principal and financial advisor, says being organized and finances go hand in hand. You will likely have less anxiety and get more work accomplished.
You can apply these following tips to your personal or work inboxes. The popular email providers like Outlook and Gmail have different tools available to reduce clutter.
"I meet so many people that have literally hundreds if not thousands of emails in their inbox," said Eggerss. "You can actually set-up a lot of specific rules that are automated in your inbox. In other words, if you always get an email from a particular person that's important, it can be flagged red."
CREATE FOLDERS
Eggerss said additionally, color coding emails and creating specific folders can help you manage all of your messages. You can label them and rank them in order of importance.
"Maybe you have all your bills go to a bills folder. Once a week you need to go and look at all of those bills. You may have a 'to do' folder," he said. "Maybe this is for your work. You have a lot of reply's to do and you can't do them all in one day."
UNSUBSCRIBE
Your email provider may already categorize spam or junk mail in different folders. If that's not the case, there are options to unsubscribe or block a sender..
"Probably the biggest reasons people have hundreds if not thousands of emails in their inbox, is because they've subscribed to so many services. They get free information. In those organizations, they'll sell your email address to other organizations and it really does snowball," Eggerss explained.