Hey - It’s Michael.
Sunny Vienna is a lot nicer than grey Vienna. Enjoy the newsletter!
The Situation
You open your mailbox. 58 new emails. Another 482 unread ones.
Some update from a coworker, a newsletter, a confirmation email, a train ticket, an invite to this event and an invoice from that service. Some super important instructions from your supervisor and a legal notice from a competitor, right next to a booking confirmation and the weekly advertisement mails from 7 different apps you use.
It’s a mess. A highly confusing & dangerous mess. A mess that costs a lot of brain power.
Every time you switch context (e.g. read the headline of a new email that is unrelated to the previous) your brain burns energy. It’s exhausting & ineffective.
Not to mention the constant mental burden of having an overflowing inbox that always occupies your brain’s RAM.
The System
Email is a dangerous tool because without proper rules, anyone who has your data can capture your attention.
So, the strategy of effective email is two-fold:
Build an intuitive folder structure & set automated sorting rules
Change your behavior with email
Folder Structure & Automation:
It’s best to organize your entire inbox around context-dependent folders:
Work
Supervisor
Marketing Team
Coworker A
Coworker B
Projects
Project A
Project B
Other
Newsletter
Apps & Services
Invoices service A
Updates app B
..
Private
General Archive
Tickets
Train
Airplane
Concerts
Finance
Bank
Tax Advisor
Hobbies
Kitesurf
Dance
Physical Environment
Flat A
Invoices of service A
Landlord
..
…
The organisation methods are of course endless. Just make sure you have one.
The key is to have a number of folders where any incoming email can be sorted into. The next step is to automate this sorting with your email client. Set rules for incoming emails:
In an ideal world, all your incoming emails are automatically sorted into folders so that you control who gets your attention.
Principle:
Any incoming email must fall into a folder.
Email Behavior
The key to reducing your inbox burden is to consistently:
create new folders & sorting rules (if emails are not automatically falling into folders yet)
and most importantly: unsubscribe!
Even after 2 years of starting this habit, I’d still get emails from some random SaaS tools I used 5 years ago. Now my inbox is filled mostly with relevant & important emails - what a delight!
The final system is how to treat your inbox:
Principle:
Open your inbox max. 1-2x per day and timebox it.
Treat it as any other recurring task. If you don’t, it’ll keep on draining your attention from whatever is really most important at the moment.
Follow this pattern:
Sort
Execute
While sorting, use the 2 min rule: do anything that takes less than 2min right away, sort the rest into a to do folder. Then execute on the to do folder.
In Practice
Create ~5-10 folders & rules for the most obvious recurring emails right now and remove them from your inbox:
SaaS tool subscriptions, sports memberships, newsletters - anything that is easy to spot and not really “important”.
The next time you open those folders, tune in with yourself to check how it feels to spend the attention on your terms.
To test timeboxing, set a 30min alarm, put x emails into a folder and work through it using the sorting + 2 min rule & subsequent execution on the rest of the emails.
Again: tune in with yourself to feel the difference of checking your inbox 27x per day.
A Quote To Ponder On:
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” - Herbert A. Simon
A Question To Reflect On:
What’s the best thing that can happen?
See you next week - Michael
PS: A few days ago I published one of my fun side quests: an app that visualizes your life in weeks. Check it out -https://go.vikunialabs.com/liw-m - it highlights the idea that life is too short to spend countless hours on emails every day.