Yuka Kato
Are you scared of opening your inbox because you know it is flooded with emails? If the thought of clutter in your inbox makes you anxious, then you’re most certainly dealing with an email overload. It’s the unfortunate reality of the digital age.
Continue reading to learn how you can identify and tackle inbox overload.
What is Email Overload?
Email overload refers to the feeling of anxiousness caused by the thought of excessive emails in your inbox. Given that a person receives an average of 121 emails at work every day, the possibility of an overflowing inbox is as real as it gets. The problem is that handling too many emails at work can become tedious, time-consuming, and overwhelming.
Unfortunately, emails are one of the most prevalent forms of communication today. There’s no way you can evade the problem of email overload by ignoring it.
Thankfully, managing email overload is easier than you think. You can handle your email overwhelm by familiarizing yourself with the concept of Inbox Zero and implementing measures that will help you achieve it.
Introduced by productivity guru Merlin Mann in 2006, Inbox Zero is a concept of email productivity management that counters the stress caused by thoughts of “too many emails in my inbox.”
What’s interesting is that by inbox zero, Mann did not imply that everyone must have zero unread or unattended emails in their inboxes. Instead, it refers to productivity hacks that help you spend zero time worrying about your inbox. Mann believed that most people confused an overflowing inbox with an email to-do list when, in reality, that should not have been the case.
This concept is an excellent antidote for anyone who spends a lot of time stressing out over too many emails. It holds more merit than ever before as email dependency increases every day.
Before delving into his recommendations to achieve inbox zero, let’s look at why it’s crucial to handle email overload.
How Email Overload Affects You
The psychological implications of email overload are quite profound—it can lead to chronic distraction, attention deficit disorder, and more. It also has many adverse effects that can affect the quality and integrity of your work.
If you aren’t sure that you are experiencing email overload, watch out for these signs:
- An irrefutable feeling of anxiousness every time you think about going through your emails
- The habit of checking your inbox obsessively throughout the day
- Wasting a significant part of your day trying to manage your emails but not being successful in your attempts
- Missing out on important emails or forgetting to reply to urgent ones
- Suffering poor communication and getting complaints from people who email you.
At an individual level, email overwhelm can lead to the following:
Loss in Productivity and Efficiency
When there are so many emails in your inbox that you don’t know where to begin or what to do with them, it adds to your workload. Even if you make your best attempt at clearing the messages, it can be a slow and exhausting process. So, a cluttered and mismanaged inbox can negatively impact your productivity, affecting your efficiency in the long run.
Lack of Work-Life Balance
When your work life is stressful, it has a trickle-down effect that impacts your personal life. Whether you are suffering from an email overwhelm or your coworkers keep coming to you with non-stop questions, an overflowing inbox could disturb your work-life balance.
You may think the correlation is somewhat farfetched, but any unresolved and recurring work problem will be a thorn in your side. This can have serious implications for your interpersonal relationships and overall well-being.
How Email Overload Affects the Workplace
The worst part of email overload is that it affects everyone and everything and can have an all-pervasive impact in the workplace.
Harms the Company Culture
Before understanding how email overload affects work culture, let’s look at a McKinsey report that studied the impact of social communication technology like email. According to the report, an average employee spends 28% of their work handling emails—this roughly covers 2.6 hours of their work day.
Now, as a staple of the digital age, emails are expected to occupy a certain fraction of anybody’s workday. This is non-negotiable. However, a chaotic and overflowing inbox that is difficult to navigate adds to the workload of employees.
Moreover, a poorly managed inbox hampers the ultimate utility you can get out of a cutting-edge tool like email. So, technology that was designed to simplify your work ends up failing its purpose, and the whole messaging process becomes counterproductive.
Creates Confusion and Leads to Information Loss
It’s easy to lose important emails in a messy inbox. Imagine a message containing crucial information necessary to close a business deal. If you don’t have effective email management practices in place, searching for details can be a painstaking task.
In addition, you can also overlook important emails and miss deadlines that affect your operations or even your bottom line. Such misses can have a severe impact on your business success.
Affects Operational Efficiency
Since its introduction, email has been an integral part of the operations of nearly every business. It’s hard to imagine an efficient workplace without emails.
While it was always an essential communication tool, emails have become even more critical in the post-pandemic world because of the prevalence of remote work.
So, problems like email overload can snowball into a major operational constraint. Reduced workplace efficiency not only affects your bottom line but can also become the reason for your business’s decline.
How to Handle Email Overload Like a Pro
If you want to avoid email overload and need tips for managing emails, try to incorporate the principles of Inbox Zero as a part of your management practices. Mann already outlined what he called his “five articles of faith” which are as follows:
1. Some messages are more equal than others, so segregate.
2. Your time is priceless and wildly limited. Use it wisely.
3. Less can be so much more. Write only as much as needed.
4. Lose the guilt. Take control of your inbox.
There are ways in which you can adhere to them:
Actively Archive Old Messages
Not all emails in your inbox are equally important. So you need to segregate the most important ones from the others, archive old messages, and delete unnecessary emails. You can also archive any email that no longer requires any action or attention.
Once your old emails are archived, you’re on the right track to mastering email productivity.
Decide if Email is the Best Communication Method
If you can communicate via a call, an in-person meeting, or through a web chat app like Google Talk, use that. Not everything needs to be an email! Choose the easier, quicker, and more convenient route for communication whenever possible.
Spend a Few Minutes Organizing Your Inbox
Shift your focus to cleaning and organizing your inbox. Label your emails so that you can easily classify them into different categories. Organize them every day whenever you open your inbox.
You can label the important emails by priority so that you know which ones require immediate attention and which ones can wait a day or two. Use filters to send certain emails to their designated labels.
It may seem like an additional process in the beginning, but organizing your emails will make life easy for you in the long run.
Improve Your Emails to Get Productive Responses
You don’t need to write an elaborate response to every single email you receive. Keep it short and simple: it will save you time and spare the recipient the trouble of going through a long and convoluted message. Just make sure to cover everything that you need to, but don’t type more than necessary.
Short and succinct emails are like a breath of fresh air to everyone who receives one. Besides being time-saving, it also helps prevent information overload.
If your emails don’t get the expected response, consider improving your drafts. Add a Call to Action (CTA), be direct, and respect others’ time. You should be able to elicit a more productive response.
Check Emails at Specific Times Throughout the Day
There’s more to your average workday than sending and receiving emails. So, focus on time management to ensure that emails don’t keep you occupied for too long to the point it disrupts your productivity.
There’s a lot you can do to prevent wasting your time on emails. Check your inbox only at designated intervals, no more than 2 to 3 times a day. During these intervals, dedicate a 30-minute block to read, reply, and send the most urgent messages. Several studies have shown that controlling the frequency of checking emails can reduce stress levels.
Use Templates to Save Time
In addition to controlling your urge to check emails constantly, consider standardizing your responses to certain messages. If you exchange similar emails with different internal or external stakeholders, create a set of templates that you can edit and send off quickly. This way, you can avoid agonizing over the exact wording of each response.
How to Create an Email Template
Creating an email template on Gmail is easy. First, enable the template settings before composing your template because it’s not activated by default. Simply click on the Settings icon (represented by a gear icon at the top right of the page) > Advanced > Templates > Enable > Save. Now, you’re ready to create a template.
Here’s a quick how-to guide to get you started:
1. Open your email and click on “Compose.”
2. Enter the text that you want to include in your template in the body of your email
3. Click on the “More” option, represented by the three vertical dots at the bottom of your inbox
4. Click on “Templates” from the options
5. Click on “Save As” and name the template before saving it.
If you prefer to use Outlook, here’s how you can create templates on the platform:
1. Log in to Outlook and click on “New Email”
2. Enter the text that you want to include in your template in the body of your email
3. Click on File > Save As
4. In the following dialog box, select Outlook Template in the Save as type list
5. Assign a name to this new template in the File Name box and click save
In both cases, you can edit the body of the template to make the changes you need before clicking the send button. Templates take only a few minutes to create but will save you a lot of time and worry on workdays when you’re too busy to draft an email from scratch.
Use “Reply All” with Caution
This is especially true for group emails because if you hit “Reply All” unnecessarily, you will end up with a long string of messages that will clutter your inbox. Be very careful with the CC function as well. Always double-check before using these features to avoid a potential pile-up of emails.
Beat Email Overload with Mailsuite
You cannot achieve Inbox Zero in a day. It’s a process that takes time to show results. So don’t feel guilty about not achieving your goals immediately, and be consistent and keep at it. Taking a systematic approach to handling your inbox should relieve the anxiety arising from email overload.
You don’t have to do all the hard work by yourself. Investing in a state-of-the-art email management solution that takes care of your inbox is a practical idea that you should consider.
A dedicated solution like Mailsuite can help with your email anxieties. It is an email management extension with features like unlimited tracking, campaigns, mail merge, secure document sharing, signature requests, and more.
But let’s focus on its email productivity management function since that’s what we’re discussing today. You can generate an email productivity report that gives you insights into your everyday email activity. These insights can help you monitor your email activity and develop good practices to achieve Zero Inbox.
