How To Tame A Wild Inbox

Cut down an overflowing email inbox down to size and prioritise only the most important things.

We really need to talk about email.

I know there’s a delicious irony that you’re reading this right now thanks to this remarkable form of communication that directs over 8 billion messages a day to and from Australians alone, but hear me out.

How many emails do you get a week? The numbers obviously vary, but data suggests that the average white-collar worker receives around 600 emails a week, or just over 100 every. single. day. It is out of control, and rising.

Email is one of the topics I write about in my weekly column for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and it always unleashes a torrent of comments from people as overwhelmed by its never ending flow. So let’s talk about it.

I have a ‘complicated’ history with email, and know that I’m not alone.

When I used to manage dozens of people, it felt like I was cc:ed on many of the important emails they sent and received, and would watch my new email count increased every time I checked it.

The number of unread emails would rise every few minutes, taunting me to constantly check them. It’s no wonder that I grew to loathe my inbox, reloading it often to see if there was any unexploded bombs waiting to blow up my day, and breathing a sigh of relief when there wasn’t.

It was literally impossible to keep up with the never-ending flow so I’d scan them, open the ones I had to, and leave many of them unread. This meant, after almost 15 years with the same email address, my inbox had over 50,000 unread messages.

Yep, you read that correctly. Fifty thousand unread emails. Fifty. Thousand.

Once I realised it was actually impossible – physically and mentally – to stay on top of my overflowing inbox, I almost graduated into a kind of zen state about it. If something was really that urgent, I reasoned, it would eventually come back. The only zeroes in my inbox were the ones left bolded and unread. And I was kinda OK with that.

It took a proper detox away from emails in order for me to re-establish a healthy relationship with them. Now, for the first time in my life, I’ve perfect a few simple strategies I use so that I’m no longer drowning in it.

An important caveat here: this is what works for me. You don’t need to do all of these, but we really should normalise talking about the different ways we are all trying to cope in a world of information overload. So here’s what works for me:

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One Useful Thing: How to Tame Your Email Inbox

1. Create the right folders

One of the books I keep returning to, usually at the start of each year, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s one of the original ‘productivity’ books that I first read over a decade ago. It’s nowhere near perfect, but there’s something about the simplicity of his systems that just clicked for me.

The system I use now is a modified version his GTD methodology. One of those is an email filing system that is super simple, with just 4 folders (or ‘labels’ as Gmail calls them):

• Next Action

• Reference

• Someday/Maybe

• Waiting For

Out of all of them, the ‘Next Action’ folder is a game-changer for me. that I’ll explain why in the next few steps.

This is what my inbox looks like:

2. Follow the two-minute rule

I’m not someone who typically responds to emails the second it arrives in my inbox. If it’s urgent, I might, but it usually takes a few days to respond to emails. This is because a) I normally only work three days a week, b) I use other methods like WhatsApp for more immediate communication and c) I utilise this system which keeps me on top of most things without overwhelming me.

The two-minute rule is simple: when you go through your email or your to-do list, if something will take two minutes or less to complete then you do it straight away.

In my case I go through every email in my inbox and will respond if it requires a short response or action, regardless of how urgent it in. If it needs more time I will file / label it into Next Action, Reference, Someday/Maybe or Waiting For. Out of all these, the ‘Next Action’ folder is my most used.

3. Use Boomerang to take back control

Boomerang is a very useful email tool. It’s a free add-on that gives you greater control on your email by adding some features to Gmail and Outlook. One thing it allows you to do is schedule emails for later, which is something I use almost every day as I communicate with people around the world on different timezones.

However, its best feature - and where it originally began (hence the name) - is that is allows you to designate an email to ‘boomerang’ back into your inbox at a time of your choosing. An example is a project you’re not going to start until next month, or a reminder about an invoice being due on a certain date.

Boomerang is a great way of setting future reminders for yourself and taking control of your inbox in the best way that suits you.

You can download Boomerang for free here.

4. Action your emails from the bottom up

Once you’ve sorted through your inbox and completed all the quick tasks that take you less than two-minutes, you should be left with just a list of items to go through in your “Next Action” folder.

Having them all in one place minimises the noise, and allows you to get a better handle on everything that needs to be completed without distractions.

One of the best ways I think about my inbox is that it’s a list of other people’s things for you to do, so you shouldn’t let it determine your workday. You always need to have your own separate to-do list, but that is an entirely separate future edition of OUTLET.

The best way to go through your ‘Next Action’ list from the bottom-up, that way you’re getting to your oldest tasks first before working up to the newest ones.

5. Declutter from distractions

If you really want to tame your inbox, the ‘unsubscribe’ button is your friend.

Every minute we spend slogging through our email in-box is a minute that we aren’t spending doing something that we love. So I consider it a major victory every time I joyfully unsubscribe from an email newsletter that I no longer read (except this one, of course!)

To help me with this over the years I’ve used Unroll. It’s a free service that goes through your entire inbox, and allows you to unsubscribe from emails instantly with a single click. No more wasting time reading things you don’t want to read, or trying to figure out how to get off a mailing list.

The way it works is not by actually taking you off their database, it’s by intercepting the emails before they get to you, which means that can always go into the Unroll dashboard at any time and un-do any of your actions. You can also ask it to “roll-up” a bunch of subscriptions you have into a single email so you can stay across things you want while still minimising the amount of noise you get sent. It’s so useful I wrote an entire edition of OUTLET about how to use it properly.

Rock Unroll

And that is 5 ways to tame your inbox.

Of course, there are still going to be times when your inbox will get the better of you, like after a holiday, a big project, or even a day out of the office.

Your email strategy is unique to your inbox, so I’d love to hear some of your strategise on how you stay on top of yours in the comment section below.

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I’m currently in Rome, which is our base for month. Not only is it beautiful Spring weather, all of the drama surrounding the new Pope has added a sense of momentous occasion to the city.

I’ve started thinking about, writing and thinking some more about the topic of my next book. I’m going to share some of my early thinking around this with you, and it’s a topic that’s more relevant now than at any other time in history.

The next few months will see me working from, writing in and exploring Italy, France, the Alps and Greece before some time back in Australia. Spring is really springing here in Europe, and I wish it could stay this way forever.

Until next time,

Tim