Declutter Your Life – One Email at a Time
If you feel like it’s time to declutter your life, it’s not just the stuff sitting around your house that’s causing stress. If you’re anything like the rest of us, your email inbox might be overwhelming you every time you open it, too. We often subscribe to newsletters with the best of intentions, or we sign up to get something free, or maybe we just sign a petition and then get 40 emails on other actions the organization would like us to take. No matter how it happens, at the end of the day, we end up with a lot of emails coming in every single day that pile up in our inboxes.
We Are Obsessed with Email
Most people don’t even realize how much time email consumes of their lives, but McKinsey conducted a large-scale study and determined that employees are distracted from work by email almost every 10 minutes – an average of 56 times a day! But every time we’re distracted from work, it takes almost two hours to fully re-engage, which means a lot of lost productivity. Whether you work for someone else or for yourself, that’s painful. McKinsey also reported that:
28% of the workweek is spent on email
Most of us check email 11 (!!) times per hour
Most of us – 84% - keep email open in the background and 64% keep notifications on all the time
70% of all emails are opened within 6 seconds
We are, according to these numbers, slaves to our inboxes.
Declutter Your Inbox to Declutter Your Life
Given those numbers and the amount of time we’re spending on email, one of the fastest ways to change how much time you spend is to change how much email you’re getting. To do that, spend every day for one week opening each email you receive and unsubscribing from it. A bulk email manager like unroll.me might help, but even if you have to do it manually, unsubscribing from all the emails you typically save for later but never read or delete because you’re exhausted just at the sheer numbers in your inbox can help save you so much time. Investing one week in quickly unsubscribing from any email list you’re on that brings you no real value offers huge payoffs in terms of time, energy, and stress.
Turn Off Your Email Notifications
Your email will still be there even if you don’t respond within 7 seconds. The point of email was to be able to communicate without immediacy. How it ever became something we treat with such urgency is beyond comprehension, but it’s a habit to change. If someone needs something from you urgently, they can text or call. But your email should be something you control; not something that controls you. So turn off the notifications so that you’re not tempted to open your email every 10 minutes.
Close. Your. Email.
You control your email, not the other way around. That means you should only open your email when it’s not going to distract you from what you actually need to be doing. To be most productive and prevent email from bogging you down, we suggest not opening your email first thing in the morning. You’re like to find something in your inbox that distracts you or pulls your focus away from your goals for the day. Instead, get to work on what needs to be done that day. Once that’s done, if it feels like a good time to do so, check your email. First, go through what has newly arrived. Unsubscribe from anything you’re able to; delete anything you can. Then, working from the oldest email forward, start replying to and dealing with emails one at a time. When you’ve completed an email, whether you’ve replied to it, taken action on it, or followed up with any information in the email, then file it or archive it.
You can also set up rules for your email so that emails from certain people or with certain subject lines are automatically moved to folders or forwarded somewhere else. Use technology to your advantage to keep your inbox as clutter-free as possible.
Digital Clutter Causes Stress
Digital clutter of all kinds can add to your stress, but email is a constant companion with new mail coming every day. Taking control of your inbox can have huge ramifications in your overall productivity. We hope you’ll try spending a week unsubscribing to everything that’s currently cluttering your inbox. Let us know how it works for you!