3 Tips To Make Your Email Inbox Less Stressful To Look At
Ones I use to reach inbox zero every day
One core skill that’s common to all jobs is the ability to manage your email inbox. It’s not a skill that you would ever add to a resume (or maybe it should be?) but is crucial to receiving tasks, collaborating with teammates, and managing your own workload.
I’ve experimented with a few different ways to manage my inbox, and over the 10 years I’ve actively used this inbox as a makeshift to-do list and an SOS button to my thesis supervisor, I’ve landed on a system that doesn’t take over my life.
What the system is
There are a few key components to my current working system:
- I have a dedicated time to check my inbox every day. I do not check it any other time.*
- I use the snooze function and schedule send function in a way that supports scheduling.
- I make use of templates to facilitate repetitive tasks.
These three guidelines help me maximize the efficiency of communicating with each other, thereby increasing the advantages of email, while minimizing the distraction that’s so often linked with this tool (minimizing the impact of negatives).
Dedicated Inbox Time
The Reason: We fail to multitask more than we as humans would like to think. With that baseline, I particularly have a weakness in attention switching, so this dedicated inbox time really saves my day. It eliminates any distractions that beckon for my immediate attention and allows me to work dedicated chunks of 26–30 minutes (pomodoros!).
It maximizes the amount of time I spend in a flow state, which objectively means I produce better work and am better at attention to detail. Subjectively, it feels like less stress, working towards a stronger sense of genuinely completing something without constantly being bombarded.
This dedicated inbox time makes it much easier to reach inbox zero for two reasons. First, when I’m doing work, I’m not wasting my time switching between emails and work. Second, when I respond to emails, I can more quickly work through them by reviewing certain emails together in succession.
For example, I filter all my Medium response emails into one folder and respond to those serially. Similarly, I filter all of my Medium mentions into another folder and add any that include writing prompts to my to-do list in one go.
Having this dedicated inbox time also lets me schedule tasks for the next day and upcoming week in one go, at the same time at the end of the day, rather than scramble around doing administrative and scheduling tasks throughout the day.
Potential Barriers and Workarounds
This being said, the reason I can stick to one 30–60 minute chunk to checking email every day is that there are minimal to no reasons why someone truly needs me this exact instant. You might be in a position where there might be situations where someone needs to access you immediately.
For this, I recommend having a quick sort/tagging system that tags or filters these words into certain labels, and to let people know to use these terms for an emergency.
This is probably the email equivalent of giving out your phone number without necessarily giving out your phone number. That way, you can also exclusively check this subfolder rather than sifting through your entire inbox all the time.
Use the snooze and scheduling function to your advantage
Not all emails require an instant reply or action. For these, I either snooze the email or schedule the reply for a later date or time.
Snooze for later
Some emails contain information. In the age of Zoom meetings, about 92% (guesstimate) of emails that fall into this category are the emails with Zoom links and attachments that I want to access only moments before the event.
I don’t want these emails sitting in my inbox for eternity, but I do want to remember to check back on them when the time comes, so for these, I snooze them for 30–45 minutes before the event so that I can adequately prepare for the meeting.
Scheduling function
As someone who does her batch email responses between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day, I do the respectful thing of scheduling all replies for the next morning. Too often, I’ve sent an email at 4:30pm and gotten a request to have something done by 9am the next morning when the task itself is non-urgent and could easily have been assigned at 9am to be done by 10am. This has been a more roundabout way of setting boundaries for those who genuinely do not respect them, and has worked quite well so far, thankfully.
I also use the scheduling function as a way to avoid scheduling conflicts. You know how all of your afternoons are open for meetings but everyone you end up coordinating meetings with choose the Wednesday 1pm slot? When I get a request to meet during a time where I technically don’t have anything scheduled, but have given that timeslot as an option to someone else for another meeting, I schedule the reply as a tentative yes so that if the other commitment replies to me wanting the same slot, I change the scheduled reply. If no conflicts arise, I’ve already composed the email and it’ll send automatically when needed without having to think twice about it.
Use email templates
Working in tandem with the trick of dedicating concentrated time to batching similar email replies together, reaching inbox zero in this dedicated time allows me to see the overall pattern of emails.
Once you set this dedicated time, you’ll start noticing that certain requests are more common than others. Without noticing these patterns, you’re likely writing out the responses to these emails manually.
Instead, once you notice these patterns, you can start creating solutions around these similar requests. You might want to start out with creating checklists for common emails so that you can quickly review them to make sure that all the key points you need to make are there. This includes emails with clients who might need you to compile a bunch of loose details (e.g., Zoom links, price points, etc.).
Take it one step further and create yourself a template that you can alter as needed. As a teaching assistant, I have a solid email template for the explicit purpose of saying “this is in your online syllabus”, with hyperlinks to the direct to certain sections.
Some folks might see the word template and think it means you have a less human interaction with the people you’re emailing, but for me, it’s the opposite. Now that I no longer have to frustratingly open the syllabus, stitch together the hyperlinks, etc., I can actually focus most of the email-crafting time on noticing any additional check-ins I might want to do.
My motto is to automate the boring parts (copy, pasting), not the human-connection parts.
Conclusion
This email system is the one that’s working for me at this phase of my life. I’ve certainly done the opposite and kept all emails in my inbox as well, and perhaps in five years I might be in a situation where this becomes the best way to handle emails.
In sharing these tips though, I hope to introduce you to tips and tricks that work so that you can take them home and personalize them as needed. There’s no pressure to go the full length of making it to inbox zero at the end of each night, but maybe the steps I took to reach it might be helpful for you to make emails less of a daunting task.
Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) loves curating productivity tips because she firmly believes that people should love what they do and be able to learn how to automate the boring, repetitive stuff as needed.
Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🌌 with pieces from me & ScienceDuuude
