It’s quite fashionable to hate email. Countless articles have been written decrying how awful it is. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to reinvent it. And the latest fad is just to give up — screenshots proudly showing six-figure unread message counts and articles about “inbox infinity” abound.
I’ve become quite the contrarian on this subject. I love email. It’s my secret weapon. Some of the best news I’ve ever gotten came in an email. As an adoptive dad, I caught my first glimpse of two of my kids through an email. I’ve closed deals, hired amazing talent, and connected great people via email.
I love Slack as well, but there is still nothing better than email for connecting with the world outside, and looping in members of your team to get things done.
I’m sure there are a lot of people who get more email than me, but I’m no slouch in that department. I’m the CEO of a 200+ employee company with 20,000+ customers. It takes a full time executive assistant and a full time Chief of Staff to keep my world in orbit right now. My email address is also not hard to figure out. In fact, I put it right on my LinkedIn page.
And yet, I get to Inbox Zero anywhere between 1–3x a week.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me how that’s possible, so I decided I’d take a little time on vacation and write this post. (Yep, sharing ideas like these are my idea of fun. 😂)
Slow the Fire Hose
People talk about the messages that appear in their inbox as if they have no control over them, and that’s not entirely true. The first thing you probably need to do is turn down the flow of messages.
Email is for messages, not for articles. There is VERY little content that I allow to flow into my inbox. Unsubscribe from all those blogs and newsletters you subscribed to. Follow them on Twitter, or drop them into Pocket. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, think about setting up a separate email account for this stuff. That isn’t an inbox; it’s your personal magazine.
Be selective on marketing. There are 10–15 brands that I have a strong connection with who I’ll let into my inbox because I actually want to hear from them. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident they will find a way to get my attention in another channel.
Kill non-essential or duplicate email notifications. Every app and service that we use is pinging us with notifications. But a lot of time, they are non-essential, or the same alert also comes as a push notification on your phone. Either change the settings in the app, or put in some email rules to kill those.
Be an aggressive unsubscriber. When you get unsolicited email you don’t want, always click unsubscribe if the link is there. Most unsub systems work with 1–2 clicks.
I know people who have followed these four tips and killed an astounding 80% of their incoming messages.
Kill the Notifications
I’m decently responsive to important things in my inbox, but the only way I got there was to massively reduce the noise, so I could hear the signal.
Turn off all the app notifications. Email shouldn’t generate banners, unread badges or sounds. Trust me, you won’t forget that your inbox exists; you don’t need any reminders to check it. Give yourself the space to do focused work and then tap your email app when you’re ready to triage your inbox.
Use the VIP feature if it’s helpful. I have my direct reports and my board members on the iOS Mail VIP list, so I get a notification on my phone if one of them emails. However, the more that our urgent stuff moves to Slack or texting, the less valuable this has become.
Free yourself from feeling obligated to respond to everything. I’m sure I miss emails from real people that go into spam, but I also get a lot of “asks” from people I don’t know. Given that I’ve committed my time to family, company and non-profit work, spending time and attention on those is breaking my commitments to others. These emails are like people who show...