When it comes to a new product or task, you’re often expected to hit the ground running. Unfortunately, poor email management can throw a spanner in the works: if you’re buried with emails, you won’t be able to reach goals on time. Luckily, there are proven ways to sort this problem out. In this guide, you will find helpful tips on how to manage email like a pro.
Understanding the Impact of Email Productivity on Workflows
Email productivity refers to effectively and efficiently managing email. It’s all about optimizing how you handle emails and improving your work processes to become more efficient. That said, we all know too well that things do not always go by the book. And chances are, you have already encountered the email management challenges we expand on below.
Email Overload – The Main Email Productivity Barrier
There are over four billion email users globally, and more than 300 billion e-mails are sent and received every day around the world. Based on these stats – and, obviously, since you’ve landed on this page – we can safely assume that handling emails is an integral part of your work life. And if you spend too much time on it and neglect your other duties, it turns into — drum roll, please — good old email overload.
So, what is email overload, and why is it a sign that your email productivity is suffering? In a nutshell, email overload is when you receive so many emails that you struggle to organize and respond to them effectively. As a result, you feel overwhelmed and stressed, which negatively affects your email productivity. It’s a vicious cycle! Here are 10 main signs that email overload has found its way into your work life:
- You feel the need to check your email constantly throughout your work day.
- You struggle to keep up with your inbox due to the sheer number of emails.
- You regularly miss or overlook important emails, failing to meet deadlines or take opportunities.
- You struggle to reply to emails timely and effectively.
- You find it difficult to prioritize and address urgent emails.
- Constant email notifications make it hard for you to concentrate on important tasks and interrupt your other workflows.
- You experience eye strain, headaches, or increased anxiety when or after navigating your inbox.
- You spend excessive time on sorting through your inbox, underperforming and falling behind your peers.
- You devote huge chunks of your personal time to checking your inbox.
- You feel upset as the stream of incoming emails takes over your life.
From decreased productivity to constant anxiety to strained relationships, email overload triggers various issues that make your work and personal life less enjoyable. Besides, it costs money and eats into your and/or your company’s profits – more on this below.
The Hidden Cost of Excessive Email Hours: How Poor Email Productivity Wastes Money
Not only is spending too much time on your inbox stressful and unhealthy, but it also leads to significant financial losses. Just look at this: on average, users spend 149 minutes daily on checking their work emails, this figure constantly increasing. If we simplify this calculation, that’s the equivalent of approximately one and a half working days each week – irreversibly lost to email checks.
This time could otherwise be spent on revenue-generating activities like new product launches, sales, marketing campaigns, and business development. What is more, email fatigue caused by heavy message overload could push 38% of office workers to quit. And increased employee turnover is a huge concern, as it is calculated to cost employers 33% of an employee’s annual salary.
Adding to the problem is the fact that 76% of employees check work emails after hours. This practice blurs the line between work and personal life, leading to a poor work-life balance. This, in turn, results in additional expenditures, like $125 – $190 billion dollars a year spent on health issues caused by workplace stress.
Common Distractions That Affect Email Productivity
Now that you know individuals and businesses alike suffer financially from drowning in a sea of emails, let’s take a look at one of the building blocks of email fatigue – distractions. Did you know that it takes an average of 25 minutes for an employee to return to work after an e-mail interruption? As a result, fewer tasks are completed, yet you get more anxious due to lagging behind.
There are several common distractions that stem from email overload. Here is how they affect your daily routine and lead to poor email productivity:
Frequent email notifications
Constant email alerts and notifications divert your attention away from important tasks. Here are a few examples of real-life scenarios where such kinds of disruptions may force you to just tread water at work:
- During important meetings: Imagine you’re in an important meeting, discussing a new project with your team. All of a sudden, your email notification pings, and your attention immediately shifts from the discussion to checking your inbox. This interruption diverts your focus from the meeting’s agenda.
- When working on a tight deadline: You might be racing against time to complete a report on time. While you are trying to concentrate on your tasks, email notifications keep popping up. Each time you pause to check your inbox, your workflow gets interrupted. Consequently, you lose valuable time needed to meet the looming deadline.
- When working on a creative task: If you’re the creative type, you regularly deal with projects that require deep concentration, like designing a new logo or crafting a blog post. Constant email notifications keep grabbing your attention and break your creative flow, making it difficult to produce innovative ideas.
Irrelevant emails
Sorting through irrelevant messages takes valuable time away from addressing important emails. For instance, if you receive numerous promotional emails and newsletters throughout the day, an important update from your manager may get buried amidst that clutter. And if you don’t notice it in time, delays in your tasks are inevitable.
Or, amongst the flood of irrelevant emails, you may miss a message from a client requesting urgent help, damaging your relationship with that client beyond repair. In fact, just the sheer volume of irrelevant emails triggers anxiety about missing something crucial, causing you to constantly check your inbox and therefore disrupting your workflow.
Unorganized inbox
A cluttered inbox makes it difficult to find relevant emails quickly, resulting in hours of wasted time. Amidst the piles of non-important messages, you simply overlook critical emails from supervisors, colleagues or clients. And this, unfortunately, leads to missed opportunities or delayed responses.
Here’s a real-life example: Meet Julia, an HR manager in a busy corporate office. Her flooded inbox is where important emails often get lost. One day, Julia failed to notice an email from the IT department regarding a major change in the HR software system. This led to a delay in payroll processing and caused noticeable frustration among staff. And then she lost a critical request from an employee for urgent leave due to a family emergency, triggering a workplace dispute. Imagine what a mess she’s now in…
Long email threads
Another factor that decreases your email productivity is long threads of messages. You may have to join an email thread halfway through, the initial context buried in previous messages. So you need to spend valuable time scrolling through to understand the conversation, which delays your response and distracts you from important tasks at the same time.
And even if you do your best to respond promptly and thoughtfully, your valuable input might be overlooked or forgotten amidst the long thread, reducing your active participation and engagement. The thing is, long threads tend to include redundant information as participants often reply without fully reading previous responses. So, everyone wastes time sifting through repeated content and may miss vital updates.
Establishing Healthy Habits for Better Email Productivity
Excessive emails eat into your productive hours, meaning there is less available time for work. Luckily, you can fix the situation by adopting strategies that help efficiently manage your inbox. Here is how you can boost your email productivity and reclaim valuable work hours:
Email Productivity Tip #1: Limit Email Checking Frequency
Research shows that workers who check emails fewer times a day report less stress than people who excessively monitor their inboxes. Indeed, constant email checking can create a sense of urgency and trigger stress, negatively affecting your overall well-being and work-life balance. It also interrupts your workflow and concentration, making it challenging to complete tasks efficiently.
You need to strike a balance between being up to date and staying focused on your tasks. Here are the best strategies to limit email checking frequency:
- Dedicate specific time slots to checking and responding to emails.
- Set up an automatic reply to inform senders that you check and respond to emails at specific times.
- Configure filters to automatically categorize and prioritize emails.
- Set up rules that move certain types of emails to specific folders automatically.
- Unsubscribe from unnecessary newsletters and promotions to receive fewer emails.
- Remove the email app’s icon from your device’s home screen to mitigate the temptation to check your inbox impulsively.
Email Productivity Tip #2: Minimize Email Notifications
When you receive an email notification, you most likely rush to check your inbox, diverting your attention from the preceding task. This is a bad outcome since task switching causes a 40% decrease in productivity.
52% of users confirm receiving email notifications, which is quite worrying based on the data above. The truth is, the average workplace abounds with desktop and smartphone notifications, so you may feel uncomfortable avoiding them – you might even believe they help you stay on top of things and increase your email productivity.
In truth, that isn’t so. Deep work becomes challenging to achieve when notifications keep pulling you away. And the constant influx of notifications can trigger a lot of stress and anxiety. In fact, experts recommend disabling all notifications on both your desktop and mobile devices. If you cannot do that, try the following tips to minimize them:
- Disable notifications for non-essential messages, like promotions, newsletters, and social media updates.
- Set up your email client to only send alerts for crucial messages or emails from specific contacts.
- Turn on the Do Not Disturb mode during focused work periods.
- Create a list for important contacts whose messages require immediate attention.
- Turn off sound notifications to avoid intrusive audio disruptions.
- Prevent banner notifications from appearing on your screen.
- Set your device to silent mode during focused work to eliminate the distraction from incoming emails.
Email Productivity Tip #3: Adopt Effective Email Writing
The average worker gets 121 emails and sends approximately 40 daily. To avoid overload and increase your email productivity, you need to know how to write effectively, conveying your ideas or requests clearly and professionally.
Effective email writing is all about better communication and productive interactions with your recipients, and here are a few tips on how to achieve it:
- Get to the point quickly and avoid redundancies or unnecessary details.
- Stick to simple and straightforward language to prevent ambiguity.
- Your subject line should accurately summarize the contents of your email and hook the recipient’s attention right off the bat.
- Use an appropriate greeting and closing to add a personal touch to your communication.
- Your emails should be properly structured and have a clear introduction, main body, and conclusion.
- Separate different points with paragraphs.
- Each email should have a single purpose or topic. Avoid including multiple topics in one email.
- Use bullet points to make information more readable and easier to grasp.
- Opt for professional, respectful language and tone when writing work emails. Use slang and abbreviations only if they are appropriate for the context.
- Check your email for spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors before sending.
- Mention any attachments or links you include.
- Express your expectations and deadlines whenever appropriate.
- If possible, use the recipient’s name.
- Make sure you are sending the email to the right recipient(s).
- If you send sensitive information, ensure you do that securely.
Email Productivity Strategies to Minimize Inbox Hours
Reducing the time spent on processing and managing emails helps allocate more resources to projects and tasks that directly contribute to your priorities and goals. Below you will find helpful tips on how to limit the time you spend on your inbox.
Email Productivity Strategy #1: Prioritize Emails Effectively
Prioritizing emails helps manage your inbox and ensures you focus on important tasks and communications. Here is how you can achieve effective email prioritization:
- Define clearly what makes an email urgent or important based on your role in resolving related issues or deadlines.
- Quickly read subject lines to identify urgent or important emails that require immediate attention.
- Sort your emails by priority. You can use categories like “Urgent,” “Important,” and “Low Priority.” Alternatively, try the Eisenhower Matrix: categorize your emails into “Urgent and Important,” “Important but Not Urgent,” “Urgent but Not Important,” and “Neither Urgent nor Important.”
- Group similar emails together by using labels or organize them into folders.
- Highlight important emails using flags or stars to easily spot them later.
- Focus on emails with approaching deadlines and address them first to avoid last-minute rush.
- Make sure to give priority to emails from key colleagues or clients.
Following the tips above will help you manage your workload and stay organized.
Email Productivity Strategy #2: Apply the Inbox Zero Approach
The Inbox Zero approach helps increase email productivity, reduce email overload, and improve your digital communication, encouraging a disciplined and proactive attitude towards managing emails.
The goal is to address all emails and take appropriate actions in a timely manner, leaving zero messages lingering in your inbox. Here are the key principles of this approach:
- Decide quickly what to do with every email – emails should not be just sitting around.
- Delete or archive unneeded emails – a clean inbox means fewer distractions.
- Forward emails that can be best answered by someone else.
- Organize your emails by topics or importance to make finding things easier. Labels and folders can help you.
- Unsubscribe from newsletters and use filters to keep unwanted emails at bay.
- Open every email once and decide what to do with it straightaway.
- Allocate dedicated time blocks to email checking.
- Assign action labels, like “Reply later” or “Follow up”, to emails that require specific actions.
Now you can use the Inbox Zero approach to stay on top of email and keep your inbox empty – or almost empty.
Using Email Management Tools to Achieve Better Email Productivity
When it comes to mastering email productivity, it’s all hands on deck. Luckily, there are email productivity tools in the market that can help you achieve your email-related goals. We recommend you to get a grasp on such software to handle email more effectively and efficiently.
The Benefits of Email Productivity Tools
You can use email productivity tools, or email management software, to process emails faster and keep your inbox more organized. The main benefit of using such software is increasing your email productivity, which can be achieved by the following:
- Email productivity tools can sort emails into categories so that you can see important ones, like messages from your management or key colleagues, first.
- They offer templates or canned responses to reply faster. This will prove especially helpful if you work in customer service and often answer similar questions.
- Using email productivity tools, you can schedule your emails to send later. Like when you remember to send your colleague an important update even if it’s late at night.
- They also help you unsubscribe from unwanted emails. Bye-bye, spam and pesky promotions.
- Email productivity tools make finding old emails easier. For example, you might need to refer to a past conversation to make an informed decision.
- Such software can mark important emails automatically. Thus, your boss’s emails will always appear on top.
- Email productivity tools can remind you about emails you need to follow up on. So, you won’t forget to remind your team about a project deadline.
- By organizing and automating tasks with email management software, you save time to concentrate on important work. For example, if you’re a business owner juggling many tasks, things will be much easier.
Try Email Tracking with the Mailsuite Email Productivity Tool
Email tracking is another important component of email productivity. It helps monitor the activity of emails sent to recipients, showing how your emails are interacted with. When using an email tracking tool, you get to see when a recipient opens your email, whether they click links within it, and whether any attachments are viewed or downloaded.

An example of an effective email tracking tool is Mailsuite. It adds a small tracking pixel to your email, which enables you to gather information about what’s happening to your email. For instance, you will know your email has been opened thanks to 2 green check marks next to it in your sent mail folder. Alternatively, Mailsuite can send you email alerts and desktop notifications when that happens. And you also get to know whether your incoming emails are being tracked.
How Mailsuite Enhances Email Productivity
There are several ways Mailsuite can help you increase email productivity. To begin with, Mailsuite can turn your Gmail app into a group-emailing tool, allowing you to simultaneously send email marketing campaigns to up to 10,000 contacts and track whether each of your emails has been opened or not. So, you don’t need to employ an external marketing tool or hide your contacts in your emails’ BCC field.
Mailsuite also allows you to create mailing lists in Gmail for literally anything and add as many contacts as you want. With this feature, you can easily message huge groups of contacts right from Gmail, which is especially helpful for recurring marketing campaigns.
Mailsuite also boasts a handy email analytics tool that shows you whether and how many times the links in your email have been clicked. You get to see the people who’ve clicked your links, while their browsing experience remains unchanged. And you don’t have to do anything to achieve that – just add your links to your emails and Mailsuite will do the rest.
Mailsuite’s features will make your email campaigns more effective by providing valuable insights. However, you also need to ensure you make the most out of your work hours. Below you will find easy-to-apply tips on how to leverage the benefits of time tracking.
Leveraging Time Tracking for Improving Email Productivity
With the time tracking software market projected to hit USD 47.1 billion in 2030, it is evident that using dedicated tools for monitoring work time is quickly becoming the new norm. That’s good news, especially with regard to email productivity, as currently, unrecorded email-related activities can leak $50,000 per worker annually. Below we expand on what time tracking software is and how it makes you more productive.
What Is Time Tracking Software, and How Can It Improve Email Productivity?
Time tracking software lets you monitor and manage how you spend your time when working on tasks and projects. It records the time you dedicate to different activities, like answering emails, participating in meetings, or communicating with clients. Time trackers can also act as email productivity tools as they offer valuable insights into how much time you allocate to email-related tasks and activities.
The benefits of time tracking apps when it comes to email productivity are as follows:
- Time tracking tools show how much time you spend on emails, helping you identify if your inbox is hogging the limelight.
- Time tracking software can help you allocate specific time slots for checking and responding to emails, reducing distractions throughout the day.
- Tracking time spent on emails can highlight areas that require improvement. For instance, you might notice that you spend too much time drafting emails or reading newsletters.
- Time tracking software can show your most productive hours. This allows you to schedule email checking for your less productive times, dedicating your high-energy periods to more critical, focused work.
Analyzing the time tracked with dedicated software helps you reflect on your work habits, both positive and negative. You can adjust your email-related activities based on your observations to give your email productivity a noticeable boost.
Setting Goals and Benchmarks for Email Productivity
With the help of email productivity tools like time tracking software, you can create a structured approach to manage your email-related tasks efficiently. First and foremost, you need to determine what you want to achieve when it comes to email productivity. It could be decluttering your inbox, reducing email hours, or providing faster responses, among other things.
Then you need to set specific goals, like spending no more than 1 hour a day on email processing or responding to an email within 3 hours of receiving it. Email checking frequency can be a good benchmark here too: for example, you can aim to check your inbox every 2 hours. It is important that you identify the most critical email-related tasks and adjust your goals according to them.
Measuring Success: Tracking Email Productivity Progress and Improvements
Another good side of email productivity tools is that they help measure your progress and keep you accountable. Take a look at how time tracking software and Mailsuite let you see your success.
Analyzing time tracking data to gauge email productivity
With time tracking software in place, you can regularly review your email productivity metrics. Are you spending fewer hours on emails? Are you responding to them faster? Carefully examine your results and adjust your approach based on them.
Here is a quick guide on how you can assess how effectively you’re managing your email-related tasks:
- Your time tracking software should accurately display the time you’ve spent on email tasks.
- Review the time data for email tasks over a specific period, such as a week or a month.
- Compare the time spent on email-related activities with the goals you’ve set. Are you meeting your benchmarks? Are you spending less time on email checking than before?
- Look for trends, if there are any, and identify patterns that may impact your productivity. For example, are you only meeting your target response times in the morning? If so, maybe it’s the best time to deal with your inbox.
- Based on the time tracker’s data, identify areas where you’re spending excessive time. Is there a certain type of email task that consumes far more time than it should?
- Analyze how your improved email productivity affects other tasks. Are you allocating more time to more important activities now?
- If you notice discrepancies or inefficiencies, improve your email management strategies. For example, if newsletters are taking up too much of your productive time, consider actions like filtering or unsubscribing.
- Celebrate achieving your goals and benchmarks. Reward yourself for improving your email productivity.
- As you reach your initial goals, make sure to set new ones to keep improving your email productivity.
Measuring Mailsuite email productivity metrics
The Mailsuite email productivity tool provides helpful data that you can draw upon to measure how efficiently you’re handling your email. Here’s how you can use Mailsuite metrics to improve your email productivity:
- Calculate the percentage of emails opened by their recipients. A high open rate means that your emails are capable of grabbing recipients’ attention.
- Measure the percentage of recipients who clicked on links included in your emails. This indicates the effectiveness of your content and call-to-action.
- Calculate the average time it takes for your recipients to respond to incoming emails. Shorter response times mean better email efficiency.
- Evaluate the percentage of sent emails that recipients respond to. Higher reply rates indicate better engagement.
- Assess how recipients interact with your emails, such as whether they click on links, download attachments, or forward messages.
- If your emails have specific aims, like converting recipients into customers or motivating them to take specific actions, track the conversion rates to see how effective your email campaigns are.
- Keep an eye on how many recipients are unsubscribing from your email campaigns. High unsubscribe rates may mean your content is irrelevant.
- Measure the percentage of emails that failed to be delivered due to invalid addresses or other issues. Low bounce rates mean your email list is clean and up-to-date.
- Analyze the number of emails you send and receive over certain periods, like daily, weekly, or monthly. This helps you comprehend your email workload.
- Compare your current Mailsuite metrics with historical data to identify patterns and trends.
By analyzing the efficiency of your email efforts, you’ll be able to optimize your outreach strategies and adjust your email communications based on your audience’s interests and preferences.
Conclusion
Mastering email productivity means becoming skilled at handling emails efficiently. Unfortunately, issues like email overload, excessive email hours, and email-related distractions, if left unaddressed, can put a damper on your work.
Strategies like limiting email checking frequency, minimizing notifications, writing effective emails, and prioritizing your email are among the best ways to overcome such problems. We also recommend you to use email productivity tools and time tracking software to optimize your email management.