Becoming the Boss of My Emails
I did it – I conquered my email!
It might not seem like a big deal, but when I paused to add up all the time I spent every day reading, sorting and responding to emails, I realized that they are eaters of precious time. Time I could be using to focus on other things, complete other tasks – or frankly, just enjoy a better work/life balance.
What could I do, if I gained an extra hour of free time every day, that wasn’t devoted to email?
In addition to the time burden, I also found that constantly breaking off from work to respond to emails was making me less productive – not just because of the time it was taking, but because it broke my concentration, too, and took me out of the focused zone that I otherwise would have stayed in.
But how to cut down on the email habit, when there are always so many to deal with? Everyone’s different, so you should tweak your email routine to suit your priorities and the nature of your job. However, I’ve found the following techniques and habits work for me – so I thought I’d share them with you:
Don’t tackle email as your first job in the morning
You sit down at your desk, you’re ready to start your day, then a notification pops up saying you have 45 new emails – and you begin to plough through them. Don’t do it. No matter what time you start your day, the beginning of a new working session is usually a time when you’re feeling refreshed, decisive and ready to focus – so don’t waste that initial shot of impetus on wading through email. Instead, get stuck into another task first, wait until it’s either finished, or you need to take a break from it – and only then turn your attention to your email. In the meantime, simply ignore those pesky notifications. Talking of which…
Turn off your email notifications
Getting pinged every few minutes when a new email comes in is both distracting and fatiguing, because it sets up an instant, automatic dilemma: do I check it now, or do I ignore it? Even if you ignore it, just making that split-second choice creates unnecessary micro-stresses in your brain, which add up over time to exhaust your mental capacity. You don’t need that extra stress – so turn it off.
Practice email batching
Email batching basically means you check and respond to all your emails at once – but only at allocated times of the day. For me, that means twice per day, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, but you can adjust the schedule to suit your own working practice. Batching works because it makes reading and responding to email a designated task in itself, to which you can allocate specific time and focus. Tackling the email habit in this way minimises that choice/distraction stress dilemma I previously mentioned – which in turn, helps you to retain clarity, calm and a sense of control over your working day. It works like this:
- Go through your email.
- Delete or reply, where necessary.
- Clear the replied email from your inbox, either by deleting it, or moving it to a specific folder you’ve set up up for a particular topic or conversation thread.
- Repeat, until you get to the end of your correspondence.
By the time you’ve finished the batch, your inbox will be completely clear – and ta-dah! Because the brain likes resolution, it will reward you with a release of dopamine that will instantly revive you and set you up for your next task.
Time yourself
Batching can itself turn into a drag, if you take too long to reply to emails. So time yourself. You can use the timer on your phone, or buy a dedicated timer – I have an old-fashioned 15-minute hourglass that I really enjoy using, because the physical action of turning it over helps to reinforce the timing habit. Timers work, because knowing you have an allotted time to respond will help you to speed up and focus – so you engage with and reply only to what’s really important. Even if you have a complex conversation to reply to that might take a little bit longer, having that timer in motion will help you to streamline your thoughts and make your response more efficient.
Unsubscribe!
On the topic of streamlining – do you really need to receive all the emails that plop into your inbox? Up to half the messages I used to get were from companies that I’d registered with, in order to use or buy a service – but once that was done, I no longer needed to keep hearing from them. Companies like to send us offers and newsletters because it encourages us to become a returning customer – and a combination of laziness and mild curiosity (“Am I missing out on a good deal?”) frequently kept me from unsubscribing from subsequent emails. But having less to delete in your inbox not only saves time – it also saves you from more of those choice/dilemma micro-stresses that build up into fatigue. So once per week, take five minutes at the beginning of a batching session to go through and unsubscribe from everything but the absolute essentials.
Ask people to message you, rather than email
There’s a reason why some people like to send long emails – reading and responding to them pulls you into the world of the sender and all their concerns and perspectives. Depending on the sort of job you’re doing, this might of course be an essential part of your work – but if not, the time it takes to read and respond, as well as the distraction it causes from your own priorities and focus, quickly becomes onerous. So encourage your correspondents to be less wordy by asking them to message you, rather than email. An enormous essay becomes more inconvenient to type on a phone – which should encourage the person sending it to be brief and to the point!
These are the habits that have helped me to become the boss of my email – simple, easy to implement and highly effective. Will they work for you? Try applying them for one week and see how much extra time you can build into your day!
Blog by Background Support
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