Taming the Email Monster – How to Stop Being A Slave to Your Inbox

F*cking Email. 

Emails you don’t want. Emails you don’t need. Email reminders. Work Emails. School Emails. Emails asking for money. Emails you are CC’d on. Emails checking you haven’t forgotten to email so-and-so. And those extra annoying group emails, where people insist on replying to all. Please don’t do that. I don’t care that you have transferred your money for the group gift, or whatever it might be – just let the person who emailed you in the first place know. And kindly leave me, and the other 294 people, to go about our daily lives in peace.

I used to waste hours every day just ‘dealing’ with emails. Like it was my ‘business’. Like I wrote emails for an actual living. I was literally a slave to my inbox and despite many attempts to empty it, it would just fill up faster still. So last week, I decided, enough is a bleeding ’nuff. No inbox is getting the better of me. Every productivity blog known to man has written about the best way to conquer your inbox – so, I read at least 12 of them. They mostly say the same stuff and in some cases state the ruddy obvious. I narrowed it down to the following 5 steps, and 7 days later I can confidently say that I am now a lean, clean email machine.

Obviously, if you are a high-profile, fancy executive type person you may need to level it up a notch or better still delegate the inbox cull.

Step 1:

• Empty That Box – The quickest way to empty your inbox is just to select ‘All’ and dump the whole lot in to a file. Call it ‘Old Inbox’. That’s what I did. Yes, the whole 1,432 of them, in all their jumbled glory. It is hard to describe the particular brand of lightness that comes from the words – Your INBOX folder is empty. Now that the slate has been wiped clean (but you can still retrieve any old emails if needed), you can start afresh.

Step 2:

• Don’t Keep Checking – this is the key factor to becoming the slave master and not the slave. Please don’t check your email when you wake up. Whoever it is and whatever they want can wait, at least until you have had a cup of tea or taken the dog for a walk. If it was something life-threatening, they would have called. It might be important, but it can still wait until you get to work or are sitting at your desk, or are in the cafe or co-working space you call home. It is amazing how this changes the shape of your day. Instead of immediately bending to the demands of others – do this, pay that, reply to this, sort that – you start your day calmly, with a clear head and on your own terms. Ever since we started walking around with screens connected to our person 24 hrs a day, this gnawing sense of urgency has started to increase. We feel we have to reply to every email almost immediately, in real time. What would happen if you decided to only check your email two (eek), or three times during the day? You would probably get a whole lot more sh*t done. I appreciate this isn’t always easy, because checking your mail can be like a nervous tick, a well trained impulse reassuring yourself you are in fact important and needed. It helps if you turn off the sounds or red dot notifications, better still use InBox Pause to hold off the onslaught when you are busy doing other stuff. For those of you that have jobs that would make this leap impossible, you can maybe change the settings so less key emails (like the never ending CC trail), are diverted to another folder, to be browsed over at the end of the day. For the Newsletters and Shopping offers you do want to keep, you can use a service such as unroll me which can unsubscribe you from what you don’t want and roll the rest in to one email to be read at your leisure.

Step 3:

• Be Ruthless & Efficient – When you decide that the time is right to tackle your email, be it twice a day, or only during your low-level slump times, don’t get sidetracked. Reply & File. Delegate (forward on and let someone else deal with it). Delete or unsubscribe. This should deal with 70% of the mail. Mark as ‘Unread’ the ones that you may need to think about or source more information on. You can even compose emails that you want to send later that day or tomorrow with Boomerang. And, unless you need to reply in writing for compliance or reporting reasons, follow the 5 sentence rule – if it is going to take more than that, pick up the phone and make the call. This can often save a whole load of emails bouncing back and forth, that could have been settled in a 5 minute chat. And don’t worry about getting caught up on a call – set boundaries from the get-go, ‘I am heading in to a meeting in a few minutes, but just wanted to ask x and confirm y.’ For the first few days this is a bit of a clunky process, as unsubscribing takes a moment more than just pressing ‘delete’. But, even now, a week later, I am greeted by less and less irrelevance and it’s a beautiful thing.

Step 4:

• Get Another Email Address. One inbox alone might seem like trouble enough, but the secret of setting up a second one is that it helps keep the first one clean. Everyone seems to be asking for our email address these days and often we are as willing to give it. Maybe it’s because we want to get the 10% discount code or to be in with a chance of winning that all expenses paid trip. If giving your email address is just a ploy to get something else, without the need to ever see their newsletter or upcoming offers, just use your 2nd email address and divert the junk away from your first. Also, pretty useful when you want to avoid the whole, ‘this email is already registered’ and you have to go through the whole forgotten your password, reset your password, slowly-losing-the-will-to-live password debacle.

Step 5:

• Spend More Time Doing The Stuff You Love. 

This Get Tidier post is brought to you by someone who has a very clean box.

Photo Credit: This photo is in the public domain and has no known copyright restrictions.