Get 3 Hours Back In Your Day: 5 Steps to Conquer Your Inbox
Seven point five.
That’s how many hours per DAY the average person spends on email! That’s kind of insane, and it should probably be less than that. Do we really want to spend our lives in our inbox? Here are a few different ways to spend less time in your inbox.
- Do an Email Audit
Take a mental account of what you typically spend time doing with your email and answer the questions below:
Category 1: What do you spend time reading & responding to?
Category 2:What should you not spend time reading?
Category 3:What don’t you really read?
2. For Emails that fall into categories 2 & 3: Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe
There are a few ways to do this. The easiest is, in Gmail, Outlook, and most email clients, on marketing emails there’s a little “Unsubscribe” link at the top that saves you time from having to dig deep to find the tiny link hidden in the bottom of the email
Another way is to use a bulk unsubscribe tool, though you should beware of the data privacy issues that come with these tools (see here)
3. Streamline your Email process
There are a number of tools in various email clients to help streamline your emails. The goal is to prevent emails slipping through the cracks, and to prevent keeping emails sitting in your inbox as a to-do list. Here are a few tools (in Gmail) to help with that:
Snooze — If you know you will need the email at a certain time in the future, take a second to snooze it until that time (tickets for events, or meeting information)
Tasks — If you know the email contains information that requires action that you won’t have time for in the moment, drag it to the Task bar with Google Tasks. This moves it out of your inbox and into a more helpful queue
Labels — If you have a recurring type of email that you want to be able to filter in the future, labels can be a helpful way to keep mesages out of your inbox while still being accessible
Multiple Inboxes — Gmail offers a tool to separate emails into separate inboxes on your home screen — this is not the default tabs setting, but one where all emails are on the main inbox screen, and you get to determine which emails go into which inbox, This can be a way to visually have control over your messages while still being able to prioritize which messages are most urgent & important to respond to from the rest.
4. For Emails that fall into Category 1: Find a way to “batch” time reading emails
An easy way to batch email time is to set aside 2–3 times per day on your calendar. The hard part is not opening your email outside of those times.
If you find that emails in Category 1 still take up several hours of your day, you still probably spend too much time in your email. This is where it may make sense to go into step #5
5. Hire a Virtual Assistant
Many entrepreneurs, including Tim Ferriss, tout this technique for email management. It is definitely a situation that requires more time investment upfront. Once you get it going, you could easily save 1–2 hours per day. Here is a detailed example of one way to use a VA
Even taking one of these steps can put both time & ease back into your day. Good luck!
