Email is like laundry. It's good to stay on top of it.

5 ways to tackle your inbox chaos without losing anything (including your mind)

Never-ending laundry is the bane of my life right now. No one tells you it’s going to be like this before you have kids. No, it’s another one of those wonderful surprises.

Over the last year of maternity leave, laundry had replaced the other bane of my life – emails. But now that I’m working again, I have double the bane (and pain).

Surely I can’t be the only one? It’s hard to be productive when you have a zillion emails to read/respond to, and now that I’m an avid Substacker and subscribe to lots of different newsletters as well, I want to have the time to read them all.

Despite being around since the 70s, it’s hard to believe that email only really became accessible to everyone in the mid 90s, when we all used to get excited about receiving one email a week. Fast forward to today and unread email notifications on some people’s inboxes look like lottery jackpots. I myself can’t stand seeing the red blob of unread emails – it’s my only OCD thing now, I promise!

Aside from looking forward to the emails that we enjoy receiving (hopefully this one is included in that list!), managing your inbox can be a daunting task, if you even bother to attempt it at all. Who has 15 hours a week to spend reading, deleting and sorting emails or emptying their spam folder and on top of that - doing laundry? Not me.

So, how can we do this easily and quickly without losing the will to live or losing important information for that matter?

Here are 5 of my strategies for tackling the chaos of unwashed garments and email overwhelm head on.

Scheduled weekly triage

Just like with laundry, to make the electricity usage worthwhile you need enough dirties to fill the machine. Find one or two slots each week and block them out just for dealing with emails.

Rather counter-intuitively, the end of the day when you’re more tired works best for dealing with emails, as they can be mentally taxing. So, rather than expend all of your fresh focus dealing with emails as soon as you log on, use that energy for the mentally challenging work instead, and then deal with the emails when you need a more monotonous task later on in the day. Of course, I know not everyone’s work will allow this kind of thinking, but it’s a good option to strive for whenever possible.

Two-minute rule

Akin to the fast setting on your washing machine – 20 minutes and the bibs are washed and ready to go. This rule comes from David Allen's "Getting Things Done" method. If you can respond to an email in two minutes or less, do it immediately. This prevents small tasks from piling up.

Priorities and labels

Just like you wash similar colours/fabrics together, and you sort darks from lights, you can use priority settings and labels to organise emails by project, urgency, or department.

This can help you quickly identify which emails need immediate attention and which can wait. For example, Gmail's Priority Inbox can automatically sort your emails based on what it learns about your email checking habits.

Ruthless deleting

Have you seen the meme below?

Washing: 30 minutes

Drying: 60 minutes

Putting away: 7-10 working days

This sums up my life right now. I liken putting away washed clothes to email hoarding.

I’m guilty of this one, big time. I like to keep emails for years sometimes ‘just in case’ I’ll find them useful again one day. Spoiler alert: not once have I ever looked back 2, 4, 5 or even 10 years and re-read any of those emails. Delete, delete, delete.

Delegate it

We can’t all afford to have a housekeeper, but if we did then they would definitely have washing on their to-do list. Same with emails, if you can afford to get someone or something else to do it for you, then you free up your own valuable time to do the important stuff.

AI based email management tools are aplenty. As of writing, there are several recommended tools out there, like Sanebox, Edison Mail, Spark, among others. Each will have their own pros and cons, so weigh up what you’re looking for before clicking sign up and giving them access to all your emails. The other option of course is that you could use a real-life human to do this for you too.

Cheers to a less overwhelming, drowning in emails and washed/unwashed clothes, kind of week! I hope it’s a good one for you!

There are probably hundreds of ways to tame an inbox and I’m always looking to learn new ones, do you have any tried and tested techniques that work best for you? Let me know in the comments!

-Selda

P.S. I cover emails as a specific topic in my course Supercharge your productivity, check it out here.

[Today’s DALL-E image was attempted 4 times with the prompt ‘show how managing emails can be like doing laundry’. I find that DALL-E doesn’t like reusing the original images it creates and editing them, it likes to start over again. The rework is really quite wasteful.]

---

P.P.S. If you’d like to learn more about how to build a life you love, here are a few ways I can help you:

Personal guidance and coaching to find more hours each day:

🤝Work with me 1-1

Double your productivity and do more of what matters to you:

🚀Supercharge Your Productivity: Take the stress out of your week and juggle all of your jobs without working yourself to death

⚖️7 Proven Strategies to a Better Work Life Balance: Spend less time at work and more time on the things you really want to do