How To Stop Email Taking Over Your Day

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Email is a fantastic tool – it’s fast, convenient, you can add attachments and hook it up to all sorts of other software. You’ve got a written record of conversations and you feel like you’re in touch with the world.

The problem is, email can take over your entire day. Even when you’re not responding, the little ‘ding’ creates micro interruptions, distracting you and cutting your productivity without you even realising.

Managing your email is one of the best ways to gain back your time. And it’s not difficult to do. The 4 easiest ways to deal with your email are:

Setting up rules
Using other software
Turning it off and scheduling
Unsubscribing

Let’s look at those in turn.

Setting up email rules

Rules allow you to predetermine what happens when certain emails land in your inbox. They are a great way to keep your inbox organised and help you concentrate on the emails that need your attention.

For example, if you have purchase receipts sent to you, you could set up a folder that these are automatically redirected to. That way, when it comes to doing your bookkeeping, all your receipts are in one place, and in the meantime, all those emails aren’t cluttering up your inbox.

Using a different software

This will only work for certain tasks that email currently does, but it is worth investigating which ones will save you time.

One of our favourite alternatives is calendar schedulers such as Calendly or Koalendar. These save massive amounts of time when booking meetings because instead of emailing back and forth trying to fix a date and time that suits you both, you simply send them a link to your calendar and leave it up to them.

Turning email off and scheduling

Turning your emails off for periods during the day will give you back more time than you realise.

Decide on set periods that you want to deal with email – maybe it’s 3 half-hour slots morning, lunch, and at the end of the day. Or maybe you do an hour at 2 pm and that’s it. Whatever works for you is fine, but set a schedule and stick to it. You can always set up an auto-reply to let people know when you’re available and a phone number if it’s urgent.

You can also write emails and then schedule them to be sent at a more appropriate time.

For example, if you’re writing an email at 9 pm, you might not want to give the impression that you are contactable at that time. In that case, schedule it to be sent first thing in the morning.

Unsubscribe from unnecessary emails

This is probably the easiest and most important tip from this entire blog. Unsubscribing from emails you don’t read or know who they’re from will be the biggest decluttering exercise you can do for your inbox.

It’s so easy to sign up for this free report or that free checklist and then forget to unsubscribe again.

If you’re not sure if you want to read the emails sent from a subscription, set up a rule to send it to a folder. If you don’t look through that folder within 3 months, you can unsubscribe.