7 ways to rule your inbox (rather than it ruling you!)

by Leo Wiles
21 March 2014

Most snowdrifts start with a trickle, gain momentum and suddenly – you find yourself flat on your back wondering how the hell did that happen.

For me, an overwhelming four pages of new missives that took a day to dig through was the catalyst to address what had become a real problem.

Inbox clutter not only hides the important emails, it takes time away from paid work to deal with. Also I constantly found myself trying to keep up. No matter if I was in the park with my children, waking up or going to sleep I would reach for my email.

The scary truth

Research shows we receive on average 108 emails a day and spend 28 percent of our time at work dealing with email. But for a writer, it’s somehow worse when you consider it can take up to 16 minutes a day to refocus on the task in hand.

So, if your inbox is getting the better of you, here are my top tips on turning spamalot into Camelot.

1. Don’t email  Pick up the phone to avoid email badminton. Avoid passing on the problem by not hitting CC or reply all. And, choose Dropbox or Google Docs to share files.

2. Mute the alerts Turn off the new email alerts on your phone or computer. Don’t let that cute little envelope pop up signalling new mail. You won’t miss it, I promise.

3. Pace yourself Remove email from your bookmark and only open it through your browser. Choose whether you’ll check it first thing in the morning, once with a cup of tea or last thing in the afternoon. Make a plan for how long you’ll spend addressing emails and stick to it.

4. Stand up to answer Regular readers will know this is how I read and respond to emails. It makes for a faster interaction and a deft delete.

5. Group your emails Select ‘by’ and ‘from’ to find the most important emails and group (and delete) those you know you can do without.

6. De-clutter Make room for some white space and head space by choosing a day to go through each of your social media streams. Delete accounts that no longer have any use to your professionally or personally.

7. Block If you find yourself regularly hitting delete before opening a sender’s email save time and block them, or unsubscribe from regular promotional material that you know you don’t read.

Still overwhelmed? Deploy the four Ds: Do it, Delegate it, Defer it or Delete it!

What are your tips for handling email overload?

One response on "7 ways to rule your inbox (rather than it ruling you!)"

  1. Rachel Smith says:

    Great tips. I do use Outlook rules a LOT, I have to say. I create rules all the time to filter specific messages into specific folders (for newsletters, PR stuff and other things). I don’t even see them hit my inbox, because they’re automatically filtered. Then I try to look at them all at the end of the day, do mass deletes, Instapaper things I want to read later and unsubscribe from things I no longer want.

    The other thing that really helps me personally is to clear my inbox every single morning and night so there is white space beneath the emails. I don’t know why, but this makes me so much more productive and completely eliminates that ‘drowning’ feeling. If I don’t do it and the emails pile up in my inbox (leading to the 4 pages of missives you mention above), things invariably get lost or not actioned. So this one is crucial.

    I also try to answer / action / file / delete about 80% of stuff as it comes in so I don’t have to think about it again.

    That said, I still have folders FULL of emails that require filing and I never have time to get to them. One day…

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