It’s not unknown that email is one of the most unproductive thing, because, even though it serves as a mean of communication, it takes so much time and interrupts many processes and, trying to escape its trap would be a beneficial thing.
I have been trying to learn about a lot of tricks and habits about emails, like filters, redirections and so on, and in this article I will try to share a simple, but effective technique that can save you a lot of time.
I have three email addresses that I use right now and I have opened them in order to be more productive, get more important things done and have a fulfilling feeling at the end of the day. One is my main one, where I get all the emails from my Professors, friends, colleagues and social media (where I use a lot of filters to organize them in different categories). The other one is my Mailing List inbox, where I get the emails from websites that I have subscribed to, like CalNewport.com, ZenHabits.net and JamesClear.com. And the third one is my Send only inbox, which I use when I need to only send an email and that I don’t want to see whether somebody has sent me anything or not.
Why does this work?
I can admit that it is not the most productive form of dealing with emails, but I do find it very important to keep a diet from all the emails that more often than not are just some time wasters, and not anything at all that has a meaningful impact in our lives.
Opening different inboxes can have a huge impact, because you can use them just for certain purposes and yet, not lose so much time, so you can focus more deeply on critical tasks, get important things done and feel relaxed at the end of the day. For example, if you are on a vacation and you need to send an email, but you don’t want to get burned out by a lot of emails that have come, then you can simply use a Send only email, where you can simply send it and still enjoy your time during the vacation. Or, you may go to your office early in the morning and see that you have accepted a letter about a great article that has been published on a certain website and there you see a lot of links for other great articles too, and after two hours you realize that you have not accomplished the important tasks that you had to get done in your job, so you get the idea of the importance of separating them.
How to start?
It may differ according to your own circumstances but just try to generalize the kinds of emails that you accept each day, for example, social media, personal emails, work emails and so on. A service like Unroll can help you. Then, decide whether you really need to check them all the time, or maybe you can check out latter who has liked your Facebook status and only see what a colleague has suggested for you about a project. After that, try to unsubscribe, set auto-responders if necessary and try to be ruthless for unimportant stuff. At the end, try to open one or two emails for certain aspects and try to use them accordingly.
It may be a bit difficult in the beginning, but after a week or so, you can understand the benefits of it. You can simply try it for a week and if you don’t like it, you can simply switch back to your previous email.
