Check Your Email like a Boss
How to have a healthy relationship with your inbox.
Emails. Thousands of them. Suffocating my inbox. Hogging space in my brain and overwhelming me with anxiety.
One glance and I’m aware of their superfluousness, and yet, and yet, I can’t push command + shift and delete.
It would take a solid week to read the 2000 plus emails crowding my inbox leaving me with the feeling of constant overwhelm and dread. Their only purpose — to make me feel like a slacker unable to “keep up.”
Screw email.
Two weeks.
This past summer, I decided to ignore my email inbox for a full two weeks, and I was more productive in my writing and monetizing my online business than I had been the entire previous year.
And guess what, I didn’t miss anything noteworthy other than a few invites to events I didn’t have time for anyway — because I was writing.
I can be OCD about certain things.
Checking off lists and deleting emails are tasks that drive my compulsive nature. I struggle to bring balance to these tasks.
Before these two weeks, I checked email morning, noon, and night. I didn’t want it clogging my inbox. This was exhausting, distracting, and anxiety-producing.
Email is a nonessential.
We all only have the same 24 hours a day to get our most essential tasks completed. Email is nonessential. I don’t need one more thing ruling me or my time when I’m focused on more productive tasks like writing and driving business to my website.
Something has to give.
Looking back on my past compulsiveness with email, it seems a bit crazy in retrospect, now that I have some perspective on it.
This past weekend I deleted with abandon, and then I deleted some more.
I deleted emails from 2015. I deleted newsletters, blog posts, and websites I’ll never read. I deleted Medium posts I sent to myself in 2015(!) that I never got around to reading. I deleted expired coupons, spam and more spam, but mostly, I deleted subscriptions I have no use for, or, I would have read them by now.
I unsubscribed like my life depended on it, and even though I occasionally felt the pang of, what if there is good info in that newsletter or Medium post? I hit delete anyway.
The reality of email.
The truth about my email inbox — Out of the 2,000 plus emails I had, only about 45 of them needed my attention. And even those were not of great importance in the grand scheme of things.
How to handle email like a boss.
Now I handle email differently than I used to.
Instead of feeling the urge to look at my email the first thing in the morning, I leave it. Sometimes I leave it until later in the day, or later in the week. I only check email once a day, and some days I don’t check it at all.
I check email on my terms.
I set aside an hour a day, or an hour a week to deliberately check it on my schedule. This way, I don’t resent my email inbox, and I get more pleasure when I check it on my terms. This way, it isn’t eating into the time I have set aside for more essential things, like writing. When I write, I feel good about how I spend my time. When I’m mindlessly checking and deleting nonessential email, I feel lousy about the time spent.
Hit delete.
Most emails do not require an action or a response. To those I say, just hit delete. Most people realize that emails don’t require an immediate answer. Texting replaced this need.
Unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe to newsletters or companies that don’t add value to your life. You know which these are. They are the emails you don’t open. If something is no longer adding value to your life, hit “unsubscribe,” and don’t look back.
Set expectations.
So that your inner circle is clear about how you use email, set an expectation with them. Tell them how you feel about email, I bet they can relate. My friends know that if they want my immediate attention, an email will not get it. They know to text me instead. In fact, I’ve had this conversation with most of my friends, I flat out told them, “if you want me to see something right away, like an invite to an event, you need to text me. If you send it via email, I probably won’t get to it until next week.” Your friends will respect you for valuing your time and attention.
Add value
When I do sit down and respond to an email, I do it will intention and attention. I write an email that adds value, and I write it well. Ask yourself before sending any communication, especially in writing, Does this add value?
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
