5 Ways to Reduce Email Overwhelm ASAP 📬

Regain control of your inbox (and time!) with simple systems for inbox management

With the average knowledge worker spending at least 25% of their day in email, mastering efficiency in this one area can free up a significant amount of time and mental bandwidth.

If you have a love/hate relationship with your inbox, you aren’t alone. But chances are good that it’s also not your fault.

For most of us, the issue isn’t that we don’t know how to keep an inbox organized. It’s that we don’t know how to manage the volume of emails we receive. And that, my friends, is typically either:

1. An organization-level issue. Your company/team doesn’t have guidelines in place to contain overall email volume to a level that is manageable by individuals.

2. A sign of weak systems. That meeting should have been an email? Yes, and that email should have been a stronger system. Having your employees overrun with email communication is a warning sign that systems are failing in other places.

3. A combination of both of these 👆🏻. We need a combo of strong guidelines and systems at both the personal and organization level in order to manage email and other asynchronous communication (such as chat services like Slack or Teams).

Below are 5 of my favorite (and most impactful) ways to reduce email volume and streamline communication so you have more time to do deep, focused work that actually moves the needle.

✍🏻 Create email templates. Look through your inbox and identify 5-10 responses you type out the most often. Then, set up templates for those responses. You don't have to just "copy and paste" them, but you can use them as a framework to help you respond quickly, rather than starting from scratch each time. See the PDF below for my video tutorial on Creating Email Templates in Gmail.

📃 Add a smart signature or contact page. Reducing unnecessary emails is all about setting boundaries. But that can be easier said than done, right? For some inspo, check out this impressive list of guidelines created by University of Washington Professor Emily M. Bender. While that might not be realistic for all of us, hopefully it offers a few ideas of things you could provide in your email signature or on your website to cut down on email volume. What are people's most frequently asked questions or things they need to be directed to? What tutorials or resources can you point them to ahead of time?

🚦 Establish guidelines for To, CC, and BCC. Without guidelines on who to include on emails, people tend to default to the “better safe than sorry mode” and include everyone. Using the “to” “cc” and “bcc” fields, you can create a simple triage system that reduces email volume.

How you utilize this is up to you, but this can greatly reduce email volume/stress within organizations. An example would be:

🟢Anyone in the "To" field = needs to respond to the email.

🟡Anyone in the CC field = needs to be aware of this information.

🔴Anyone in the BCC field = just needs a copy of this information for their records.

People can then:

📁 set up filters that will automatically send emails they are CC'd or BCC'd on into separate folders, so those types of messages are not cluttering up their inbox.

🌈Set up labeling so those messages are easy to identify (and overlook) in their inbox.

🔔 Turn off notifications for messages that they are CC or BCC’d on so they aren’t a distraction.

Utilize this triage method when you're starting threads, but also as the thread evolves. Move people through the To/CC/BCC stages as their connection to the information/project evolves.

⏰Have designated email times. Popping in and out of email all day is a major suck of our focus (on average, it takes 10 minutes to refocus when we’re interrupted). Plus, taking time away from email (both physically and mentally) reduces burnout and overwhelm and allows us to do deep, focused work

Establish clear times when you send and reply to emails and stick to them. You can even add this as a note in your email signature so people are aware of this boundary (ex. “I respond to emails daily between 3-4PM CST.”). Pro tip: identify what time of day you are best suited to respond to emails. For many of us, our energy peaks in the first 2-3 hours of work --so you might prefer not to waste that good energy on a mundane task like email. You might also find that having email as one of your first "to-dos" causes you to procrastinate, zaps your energy, or ruins your mood. Figuring out the best time of day for you will help email become an enjoyable task rather than a chore.

💪🏻Strengthen your systems. Email is usually not the most efficient way to collaborate on a project, give feedback, share files, build strategies, find meeting times, and on and on and on. If your inbox is full of these topics, that is a sign that your systems are not working for you. Pay attention to those long email threads where you are going back and forth on the same topic. Then, look for ways you can streamline or automate it instead. Examples would be services like Zapier that can automatically create meeting notes + share them when a meeting ends, or Doodle which helps you quickly find meeting times (Outlook and GoogleCal also have these built in). See the PDF below for a list of the suggested services I rely on to streamline these types of conversations.

If you’re part of a larger team or organization a key factor to implementing some of these tips will be getting other members on board. That’s why I’ve put this info into an eBook that you are welcome to download and share.

Paying subscribers can download that file below, and can also ask questions about inbox management in the comment section.

The eBook includes:

✋🏻 The five tips above, with a bit more detail + helpful steps
📼 Video tutorials for setting up email templates + smart signatures
📑 A list of the services I use for streamlining “back and forth” email convos

Now you're ready to start implementing! Try picking your favorite tip from the list and set it up right now. Then, come back tomorrow and implement another one. Repeat until you feel like your email has reached a level that you can reasonably manage.