Take Control of your Email

How to reduce email overwhelm when you can’t turn off notifications

In a business where customer service and quick response times are cornerstones of your company’s success, advice like “reduce email distractions by closing the program and checking it only twice per day” is not an option. Even checking it only once per hour isn’t viable when every minute matters for your customers.

When you can’t close your email program or silence the notifications, there are some real strategies you can employ to reduce the overwhelm and not only bring some sanity to your inbox, but actually make it feel like a power tool that keeps you nimble and moving fast, no matter how many emails hit your inbox every day.

Take control of your notifications

The purpose of a notification is to let you know something important has arrived that needs your attention right now. Not every email that comes in is worthy of your immediate attention, and some are likely not worthy at all. You can control which emails trigger a notification and reroute others to a quiet corner to wait until you have time to read them. Use these strategies to eliminate notifications from emails that should not be interrupting your work:

1. Unsubscribe. I’m guessing you receive a significant number of recurring emails you immediately delete every time they hit your inbox, over and over again. These emails cost you precious time and attention, even if you’re only taking the 2 to 3 seconds needed to read the email preview—this adds up to significant attention loss over time. For the next few weeks, unsubscribe to every one of those emails as soon as they come in. You’ll feel the distracting noise level in your inbox become a bit quieter pretty quickly.
2. You have a personal assistant: Rules. For the informational emails you still want or need to receive, but don’t need your immediate attention, use rules to (optionally) mark them as read and then route them to a folder as soon as they arrive to eliminate the notification. Most email programs contain this feature; if you’re an Outlook user, here’s how to do it. Worried you’ll forget about them? Put a recurring task or event in your calendar with a reminder to check in and review the folder(s).

Liberate yourself from folders and 10X your speed

This suggestion may feel a bit unsettling for some, but hear me out. As someone who has large, deeply nested folder trees in my email and on my computer that would make some people feel queasy, it took me a while to embrace this. I finally did away with folders in my email a few weeks ago and I’m here to report that I don’t feel disorganized in the least, nothing is lost, I can more easily find any email I need, and—most importantly—I’m triaging my inbox 10X faster every day.

Here’s the thing: many people under 25-30 years of age don’t use folders, they don’t even understand the concept. They simply put all their files/emails in one place on their computer or in their email and use the search function to find what they need. And it works.

The question to ask is, are your email folders really serving you? According to this article from Harvard Business Review:

On average, people create a new email folder every five days and have 37 on hand. But this approach — clicking on folders to find what you need — is 9% slower than searching with keywords, or 50% slower when compared with searches using common operators (e.g., “from:support@ilumalearning.com”).

As a hold out folder power user who has finally switched to a folder-less search approach in my email, I can say that my own experience backs up this statement. In addition, the ability to simply use the native archive email function instead of dragging each email to a specific folder or the 5 steps it took on my phone means I’m cleaning out my inbox in the morning in a matter of minutes (sometimes seconds), and I’m able to keep it clean throughout the day.

The singular folder I continue use is a “To Read” folder. There are quite a few email newsletters I value and read regularly, but I don’t need them knocking on my mental door when I’m working. I use a rule to route them all to this folder and read them when I have time.

While I’m not yet ready to let go of the folders on my hard drive, I’m feeling pretty liberated and a lot more powerful when I visit my inbox now. And that leads me to the next suggestion:

Inbox zero

After unsubscribing from all the noise, going folder-less and setting up some rules, I finally achieved Inbox zero for the first time ever a few weeks ago. It took me a couple hours to process all the emails sitting in my inbox, but the impact and return has been far greater than I ever anticipated. The overwhelm is gone, important emails are received and tended to much more calmly and quickly, and I’m able to do an easy final sweep at the end of the day to maintain my clean inbox.

Not convinced it will be worth it? Get this: according to that same article on Harvard Business Review,

Full inboxes waste 27 minutes per day.
When we check a crowded inbox, we end up re-reading emails over and over again. We can’t help it; if they’re there, we read them. On average, professionals have more than 200 emails in their inbox and receive 120 new ones each day but respond to only 25% of them. Without a conscious clear-out plan, the backlog keeps building. And, if people go to their inboxes 15 times per day and spend just four seconds looking at each email (the time it takes to read the average preview text) and re-reading only 10% of them (an estimate based on the number of messages that fit on average computer screen), they’ll lose 27 minutes each day.

I don’t know about you, but I have much better things to do with those 27 minutes every day. I realize Inbox zero isn’t for everyone, but if this resonates with you at all, I highly recommend giving yourself this gift. And it’s a lot easier to maintain that you might think.

Move Fast and Keep it Clean

If you’ve made it this far and are considering implementing any of these suggestions, you may be wondering how sustainable this is. I can report that after implementing all of the strategies above, I’m able to very quickly process my inbox and keep it at zero every day by doing only one of four things with each email:

1. Reply and/or Archive: if I’ve replied, I archive it. If it requires more from me, I move to step 4.
2. Delete it (unsubscribe first if needed)
3. Move it to the To Read folder and setup a rule to route it going forward
4. Convert it to Task (and archive it if not done automatically). More on this below:

Some of us use our Inbox as a To Do list. I’ve always used it that way. Now, I highly recommend kicking that “strategy” to the curb. It’s just too messy in there, and things get lost. It’s very easy now to convert an email into a task and get it out of your Inbox. Many To Do/Task apps provide an email address you can use to forward an email into your task list (archive the email after you send it!). If you’re an Outlook user, it’s even easier (short how-to video). Use your inbox for communicating, not for doing the work.

Outlook users can use the built-in Quick Steps (another short how-to video) to quickly process emails if the four options outlined above aren’t enough to clear your inbox.

When we take control of our Inbox, our email can be transformed from an overwhelming, noisy distraction into an efficient, streamlined workflow tool. It might feel like there’s never enough time available to accomplish all the strategies discussed here, but considering the 27 minutes already lost to full inboxes every day, and the average 2.6 hours per day we inefficiently slog around in our email, there’s much, much more time to be gained.

A few extra nuggets

Lean on your software

If you use Outlook and you would like to achieve Inbox Zero, use these native Outlook helpers to get you there.

10 Essential NEW Microsoft Outlook Tips & Tricks for 2024

Includes rules (@9:50), quick steps (@7:32) and more
Watch the full video on YouTube

Everything Search

With this search tool, it doesn’t matter if you have a file located somewhere in the depths of a five-levels-deep, 867 folder structure on your Windows PC, you will find it in an instant. Tested, approved and appreciated daily by this writer: Everything by voidtools