Streamline Your Attention With Multiple Email Accounts
I have 6 accounts and it keeps me sane
As I’ve grown older and life has gotten more complex and layered, I’ve extended my inboxes to include 6 email accounts.
- Personal: For important accounts like utilities, friends and family contact me here, etc.
- Junk: Used when I need to enter an email for a discount or to checkout at an online store that I don’t care about long-term
- Work: Strictly for my day job
- Crypto: If you are involved in crypto, I highly suggest using Protonmail. Very secure, and nice to have all your crypto-related account communications in one place
- Side hustle: I have a couple side hustles and I direct all subscriptions, accounts, and correspondences related to them to this email account
- Inspiration: For newsletters and other subscriptions that are meant to feed my brain and soul but don’t require daily checks
While you can create categories within a single email account, if emails from all your varied interests and obligations are flowing into one inbox, your eyes are distracted and ping-ponging from one category to the next.
Instead, you can take control of this by assigning each type of content to its own inbox and adjusting your engagement with each based on how frequently you need or want to check it.
The primary benefit of this approach is that you can control how distracted you are by each type of content at different times of the day or week.
For example, I need to check my personal and work emails daily. High urgency stuff might come into these accounts so they require consistent check-ins. Personal account gets checked in the morning, at lunch, at night, and sometimes as-needed.
Work email stays open in my browser during work hours, and gets stuffed into OneTab at the end of the day. Out of sight out of mind. If I were to also keep my other email accounts in open tabs throughout the day I’d be horribly distracted wanting to peek at them. So instead, they get stuffed into OneTab whenever I need to focus on other things.
I check my side hustle email when needed, usually daily, but ideally not during work hours.
The junk mail account almost never gets opened unless I need to verify an order status. I love that these all reside in their own inbox so my primary accounts don’t get diluted with meaningless content.
My inspiration account, while the most pleasurable to open and read from, doesn’t need daily or even weekly reading. So I open this when I have the time to catch up on life-giving content from creators and organizations I respect.
Consider creating similar email buckets for yourself to take firm control of how many things are competing for your eyes’ attention at a given time. No more opening your email intending to find that electric bill you need to pay and instead, getting distracted by the 15 emails that came in since this morning on black Friday sales, Facebook message notifications, inquiries about freelance work, and your mom asking for a recipe.
Create the organizational categories that fit with your life and optimize them to optimize your time.
