How I deal with email

inbox = ['new email'] * 1000

for email in inbox:
    print("📧 Deleting... Archiving... Ignoring... 😅")

print("🎉 Inbox zero achieved! Time for a victory dance! 💃")

I know a lot of people loathe the experience of email. For many, reaching inbox zero is tantamount to spending more hours than there are in a day (that is, if you deal with every email accordingly instead of simply deleting most of them and ignoring the ordeal entirely).

The thing about email is that email itself is not what most people dread. As the default communication channel, it’s one of the easiest ways to contact other individuals or groups in a formal manner. Virtually everyone has an email address; not everyone has a Twitter account, or is willing to default to it for communications.

What sucks about email is not the emails themselves, but rather dealing with what ends up being a bottomless ocean in your inbox. When you can’t change the email that’s coming into your inbox, you need to work on the system you use to deal with the emails that you receive.

The key is to reduce the amount of time you spend fighting with your inbox to keep it empty (or as empty as possible), and to avoid the stress that comes with the number beside your inbox button showing you how many unread emails you still have to get through.

Tip 1: Use Keyboard Shortcuts

As somebody who codes, I can tell you with confidence that the keyboard, when used properly, can be much faster than a mouse or touchpad when you need to get things done. No matter what your email client of choice (I use Gmail), it probably has several keyboard shortcuts for actions like deleting, archiving, labelling, and more.

Getting familiar with some of these shortcuts can help you deal with multiple emails quickly (or quickly undo send when you realize you’ve made a typo!). What’s more, these shortcuts can be usually remapped as well, lending you even more control over the fine details of your inbox.

Tip 2: Sort Your Emails

One of the most useful features of any email client is the ability to add custom labels, enabling you to organize your emails in any way you see fit. The key with sorting your emails is to never leave anything in your inbox at read.

Whenever I read an email and I don’t delete it immediately, I add a label that distinguishes between emails that need immediate attention, emails that can be dealt with a later date, or emails that just need to be archived under a specific label for future reference. This way, I have specific lists of emails of different priorities that need to be dealt with, allowing me to prioritize my work and preventing my inbox from being cluttered up with a variety of different emails.

You can also create different rules and filters to automatically sort your inbox and make your job even easier. For example, you can set all emails from your colleagues to fall under the ‘Work’ label, or emails from newsletters to fall under the ‘Newsletters’ label.

Tip 3: Batch Time Spent on Email

It can be very tempting to check your inbox every 15 minutes or so, especially if you’re working on something that might not be very exciting and there’s a lull in the action, but it’s crucial to batch sending and dealing with email so you don’t break your focus by diverting your attention between multiple tasks at a time. At its core, multitasking is simply switching focus between tasks really quickly. It’s inefficient, and the last thing you want when dealing with email is to be inefficient.

Instead of checking your email whenever you feel like it, it’s worth it to schedule one or two blocks in your day to deal with your inbox. Having the time blocked out in your day can help avoid the temptation of checking your emails eerie now and then. For example, I schedule all my email tasks after an hour of focused work in the morning, after my lunch in the afternoon, and before dinner in the evening. Sticking to this schedule religiously has allowed me to stay on top of my inbox while wasting as little time as possible.

The best thing about building a system for email is that you only need to build it once. With email being such a core part of our work, being able to process email more efficiently saves you a lot of time and stress over time.