How to Handle Email Overload by Deleting…Everything
Get-It-Done Guy helps you master your inbox by understanding how your brain works, and reveals a much better way to deal with email overload.
If you follow Get-It-Done Guy on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve probably heard me talk about the productivity musical I co-wrote. One of the tips in the musical is all about mastering your email overload. You’ll hear an excerpt later in this episode, but here’s how the tip came about: I was pondering my inbox… (insert dreamy flashback music)
Oh, email. You are my salvation and my damnation. You enslave me, yet, I can’t get enough of you.
It’s bad for me, but Europa has it far worse. Her day job is running the register at Bernice’s gardening shop, Green Growing Things II. But she’s really the secret owner of the entire Eastern Bloc. through a maze of corporate shells. Unfortunately, that means that whenever a decision has to be made, someone sends her an email asking her opinion. She’s looking so stressed out that even her faux-Ermine fur coat is beginning to look a tad … peaked. And Europa doesn’t like to look peaked. She gets testy.
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Email Volume Depends on Them
The reason email can be stressful to handle is that there’s just too much of it. In the 90s, Grandma Cuddles sent Europa cute little joke emails. Europa learned to delete the messages unread. Then marketers discovered spam. They sent ads for “natural female enhancement.” She didn’t need enhancing, so she deleted those unread, as well.
But now, the worst has happened. Customers, prospects, co-workers, and high-ranking officials in her economic empire now all use email. She has to read those, because there may actually be something important in there.
Europa receives an email from Underling #73. The subject line is: “Please supply critical information.” Europa opens the message. Underling #73 asks, “Do you know Melvin’s number?” Really? This is about Melvin’s phone number? Regardless, now the ball’s in Europa’s court, and #73 feels justified in moving on to another project until Europa responds. She could have #73 executed, but she knows from bitter experience that #74 isn’t likely to behave any better. She looks at me and mutters under her breath, “I’m in email hell. I’m in Total. Email. Hell.”
Handling Email Depends on Your Brain
Handling Email Depends on Your BrainThis new kind of useless-but-distracting email is especially pernicious (thank you, 8th grade vocabulary!)
You see, Europa must open each message to triage it. This is draining. The messages arrive in they order they were sent, and she triages in that order. She must hop from topic to topic, with no regard for her own priorities. She has to read low-priority, time-wasting items, like the request for Melvin’s phone number, just as she reads super-important messages about her impending acquisition of China (the country, not the dishes.)
Each time, her brain has to jump to the new topic, and that takes energy. By the time she’s finished browsing her incoming inbox, the last thing she wants to do is actually work on anything. The triage is draining.
Delete the Emails You Don’t Want
Delete the Emails You Don’t WantEuropa is not to be trifled with, however. Her motto is, “The best way to take out a molehill is to use a mountain-sized rocket.” She leaves nothing to chance.
When she received #73’s email message, it pushed her over the top. With a sudden battle cry, her eyes lit with a terrible red fire. Wisps of smoke began to rise from her faux Ermine coat.. And with a huge battle cry, she selected all the messages in her inbox and pressed Delete.
“Inbox empty.” declared her email program.
And she let out a shriek of pure, unadulterated joy. She had deleted the emails she didn’t want. Which would be all of them.
Rescue the Emails You Do Want
It only took about 30 seconds for shriek to turn to one of pure, unadulterated terror. She screamed, “Oh my Golly, what did I just do?!?! What if I deleted something important?“”
Well, first of all, if you don’t respond to something that’s “really important,” they’ll send it again, or call when you don’t respond. Second, virtually every email system saves deleted messages to a Deleted Messages orTrash folder.
Inbox empty, declared her email program. She let out a shriek of pure joy.
Before she could go ballistic (and when we’re talking about Europa, “ballistic” is not a metaphor), I had her click on her Trash folder. “Your messages are safe and sound. Now, just move the important ones back into your inbox.” She did.
And much to her surprise, she only moved a few messages back to her inbox. Those messages were all relevant to the projects she’s currently working on. Somehow, mysteriously, “delete-then-rescue” was a completely different experience from email-as-usual.
Your Brain Isn’t Symmetric
That’s because your brain isn’t symmetric. When all your messages are in your inbox, your brain thinks of them all as potential tasks needing to be examined and handled. The question you ask about each message is, “Is this safe enough to delete?” And then just to be safe, you keep all the “maybes.”
When you’re looking through your trash folder, however, your brain thinks of the messages as deleted. They’re gone. They’re off your plate. The question you ask about each message then is, “Do I want to bring this into my life?” Now, the “maybes” don’t seem important enough to warrant a “Yes” answer. So you end up moving many fewer messages back into your inbox, and end up with a lot more energy left to deal with the messages that really matter.
Europa is happily typing away. Thanks to “Delete-Then-Rescue,” she’s having her most productive email day in ages.
Next time you’re faced with a full inbox and feel like you’re in your own version of Email Hell, don’t delete the messages you don’t want. Delete all your messages. Then go to your trash folder and rescue the messages you want to keep. You’ll find yourself saving so much time that you can go write a musical about it. One that features songs like this: you can watch a 5-minute video with samples of three songs from Work Less and Do More: The (Zombie) Muscial at WorkLessAndDoMore.com.
Listen to the audio recording here: delete then rescue excerptopens AUDIO file
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
