How to get to Inbox Zero

Between that last email subscription you don’t remember signing up for and the frequent office blasts, email can feel unwieldy, to say the least. And achieving Inbox Zero — the austere approach that dictates getting your inbox to the zen state of zero emails each day — may appear to be an impossible dream.

Luckily, there are apps and best practices that advisers use to cut through the clutter. The latest bells and whistles in the app store offer functions that promise to declutter, defer and organize — some even with virtual assistance.

Cutting back on the newsletters

Every restaurant perk or clothing store discount seems to require signing up for an email newsletter nowadays, so it’s hard to tell exactly how you wound up with 50 newsletters you never plan on opening in your inbox.

To tackle the problem, Unroll.me identifies subscription emails and stacks them up in cards, allowing you to swipe left and unsubscribe in one go. “This shaved nearly 100 daily emails off my system that have build up over time,” Ted Jenkin, co-CEO and founder of Oxygen Financial Inc., said in an email.

The app also has a “rollup” function that compiles the subscriptions you want to keep into a single daily digest for you to scroll through at your leisure, so they don’t clutter your inbox.

“It helps me focus and not get bombarded with nonsense in order to get to what I need to do,” said Ashley Bleckner, a financial adviser at RS Crum Inc. who said the app shaved her daily emails in half.

Similarly, Triage, the iPhone app, turns your inbox into a mobile-friendly user experience, stacking emails in cards for you to deal with with a few swipes and taps. It supports most popular email services, including Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

(More: Apps for financial advisers to help with time management)

Utilize CRM and make your own rules

Outlook does a good job of sorting your inbox into Focused emails, where your most important emails go, and Other emails, which catches the rest. If you want to go a step further, however, you can download Outlook’s SimplyFile add-in, which helps quickly organize and file all messages.

Marc Shaffer, principal at Searcy Financial Services Inc. in Overland Park, Kan., does not like relying on third-party apps, preferring to stick to the functions in Outlook and CRM software like Salesforce. Mr. Shaffer has rules he’s set up to cut through the 100 or so emails he gets in his inbox in a given day. Usually, about a third of them are emails he needs to get to.

“I like to have a pulse on my inbox,” he said.

(More: 11 habits of highly successful financial advisers)

Mr. Shaffer has 22 folders: Bills go into one folder, deals and discounts from clothing companies in another. His Kansas State University emails get filed away with alumni events and football tickets.

He tackles client emails during the day and opens his folders toward the end of the day, when he has time to peruse the newsletters.

Mr. Schaffer tries to achieve Inbox Zero. “It’s overwhelming, but these rules have allowed me to stay up on it, so that it doesn’t get out of hand,” he said.

Set up reminders

When Mr. Shaffer doesn’t have time to respond to an email but knows he’ll have to revisit it at a later date, he marks it with a “task,” or a date and time for the email to come back with notes on his next action in Salesforce. The tasks help him, so that he doesn’t have to subconsciously remember what to return to later.

“When you have 1,000 things to get done, you don’t really remember them, because of the 10 things you need to get done,” Mr. Shaffer said.

For another option, you can download Boomerang, a plug-in that works with Outlook, Gmail, MS Exchange and Hotmail. It allows users to schedule emails, get read receipts and send follow-up reminders.

Virtual assistants

There are also the apps of the future. Boomerang is now taking an AI-powered approach to email management and so are other apps, like Astro Mail. The intelligent email and calendar app offers an “Ask Astrobot” function that lets you talk to the app and give it commands.

You can ask the Astrobot to delete emails, unsubscribe from others and archive what you want. It can also set up reminders and suggest actions, like adding contacts to a VIP list. For fun, it can also roll the dice, flip a coin, decide what you should eat for lunch and read your fortune.

The app is available on iOS, Android, Slack and Amazon Alexa.