Control Your Inbox and Reclaim Your Life

I used to get over two hundred emails a day. Now I get less than five. There are days I don’t get a single email. Just imagine that. I come to work with a set of things I want to get done, and I do them, and nothing else.

Do you accept email as an essential part of your job, and spend a good part of your day in your inbox? That’s understandable. If a client emails you about a problem, then it’s your job to reply with a solution. If your boss emails you a question, it’s your job to email an answer. If a prospect emails you for a quotation, it’s your job to email them an offer.

But here’s the problem — as long as your job is answering email, you are not in control of your time. You can’t set priorities. Worse yet, you can’t do any strategic or creative work or pursue long-term goals. You’re reacting, not managing. Your email inbox is your To Do list, and you’re not the author of it.

When I realized that, I decided that it had to stop. I began a ruthless mission to empty my inbox and keep it empty. This is how I did it. I stopped working through my inbox and whipping through emails as fast as I could. I began to look at each email and asked myself “How could I ensure that I never get another email like this one again?” I found that my emails fell into a few categories:

Automated Mailings

The first and easiest way to reduce inbox clutter is to take the time to unsubscribe from everything. I know it’s important to stay informed about what’s happening in your industry. That’s what blogs are for. You get to choose when you read a blog. Most of the content I was getting via email was accessible online. So I unsubscribed from all newsletters. If it was something that I valued, I bookmarked the blog in my web browser.

I have a folder in Chrome called Blogs. It has subfolders for the types of content I read. When I want to catch up on my reading, I set aside the time that works for me. I choose the topic to read up on, and visit the blogs in my browser. I don’t see every new idea as it’s published, but that’s okay. If there’s anything earth-shattering happening in my field, I’ll hear about it on Twitter.

Maybe there’s a newsletter that I need to follow, and I can’t get the content anywhere else. For those, I create a rule in Gmail to move those emails to a folder called “Read Later.”

Other automated emails that I want to get are things like automatically-generated invoices. Those I direct to a folder called “Print and file.” Then I can go through that folder and print all the attachments at times that work for me.

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