It’s a new day, you’re checking your email and you see that dreaded message again: your email provider is informing you that your inbox is almost full. If you do not dump some of its contents, you may be unable to receive future messages, or the provider might just start deleting emails for you.

Either way, unless you take some immediate action, you may miss out on important messages from colleagues or clients in the coming days. It is time to devote some effort to a big cleanup and, better still, a more streamlined email system.

Kyla Rozman, a professional organizer with In Order To Succeed in Vancouver, shares the first four steps toward getting that inbox under control:

1. Delete large batches of emails at once
Because we often don’t delete old messages, those emails tend to become buried by newer items. The best way to bring the unnecessary messages out of hiding is to change the sorting option for your inbox.

Instead of having your emails organized by date, view them by sender. This will group emails under specific names, Rozman says, and it will be easier to scan the subject headings to see which messages can be eliminated.

For example, when you filter emails by sender, you may realize you have many old messages from your child’s former daycare. Those can be easily deleted.

2. Archive reference material
Your inbox likely contains memos that you are holding on to for future reference. These can include memos from colleagues and your branch manager as well as newsletters about industry trends and regulations.

To get those emails out of your inbox, create an “archive” folder and use it to store those messages, freeing up space in your inbox.

3. Deal with emails that require action
Once you’ve archived certain emails, Rozman says, look at the remaining messages that require some sort of action or follow-up.

First, take care of the urgent messages that can be dealt with quickly, such as the most recent emails from clients or staff regarding day-to-day meetings and other activities. Your second stop is older, less urgent messages that do not require much thought and can be responded to quickly. This will get the easier emails out of the way.

Next tackle the emails that require some action before you can respond — for example, the restaurant at which you are holding your next client appreciation event asking about your menu preferences. This will require more thought.

After you’ve handled those three categories of messages, you can deal with everything else in your inbox, such as personal messages or newsletters you subscribe to.

4. Pace yourself
If you have thousands of emails in your inbox, Rozman says, going through those first three steps could take days.

If that’s the case, create a folder for any messages that are more than 60 days old, Rozman suggests. Focus your immediate organizational efforts on messages from the past two months and make a weekly appointment with yourself to go back to that folder of older messages.

This is the first installment in a four-part series on organizing your email.

Next: Keeping the system going on a daily basis.