Email Fatigue Is Real, But You Can Stop the Pain!
Counting the Cost
Have you missed important emails like I have?
Freelance businesses or anyone working from home already has
to battle the temptation to “stay at work” just a little longer.
But email strikes everyone.
And it has a special little curse. We can check it anytime, often without
disturbing anyone else. In the car, standing
in line, laying bed, even in the bathroom for crying out loud! We sneak a peek everywhere because ... we don’t want to miss something important.
It happens anyway.
The worst part: we
signed up for it!
- Professional growth blogs to help us up our game
- Free e-courses to optimize our game
- Quick, easy, healthy recipes to save our dinner-making sanity
- Inspirational quotes to keep us going when we want to give up
- Individual lists for market study to stay on top of our game
- Travel offers for business trips and that escape to a small island nation with no internet
- E-bills/E-banking to help us stay on top of our finances.
The list of possibilities are endless. All good things.
That doesn’t even include your other email which is just for
fun, spiritual growth, hobbies, bills, notes from friends and family …
It’s easy to get 50 or 100+ emails a day that aren’t
directly related to work. Worse, it’s
easy to get sucked in by great-looking free offers enticing us to sign up for more.
It’s time to get that monster vanquished and I’m determined. Want to join me in reclaiming
your inbox sanity? Read on!
Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe
Streamline for better time management. Less inbox distractions means less things to intend to get done. Merely deleting (or worse, ignoring) the stuff you aren’t reading
is only creating pain for you tomorrow, or the next time they send you
something.
If you aren’t going to read it, you aren’t getting any
benefit from having emails sent to you, right?
Let go of guilt and shame about what you “should” read. Be realistic about your time, those things that move your business forward, and cut the
cord!
If it helps you feel any better, create a bookmark to their
website, in case you find some spare time and want to re-subscribe. (Decluttering bookmarks will be another
project for another time!)
Subscribe Wisely
I have developed a new policy. When I subscribe to something, I will give it
2-4 weeks max to evaluate. I will access
the return on time investment.
Inbox offenders who send multiple emails a day don’t take me as long to remove, unless I want it for market study.
If they are sending a great email once a week, it may take a month for
me to decide if it’s something I want to read regularly.
If the majority are saved to “get back to later” it’s a
candidate for elimination. If I’m really
unsure, I’ll give it another week or two.
It always comes back to priorities. There isn’t enough time to read all of the
great stuff out there. No shame in
realizing it’s time to let go. (I'm trying to build up my courage to do this - can you tell?)
Make Use of
Technology Helpers
If you Google inbox helpers, you’ll find a slew of options
like Unroll.me, Boxer, ProtonMail … etc available to help you manage your
email. Quite a few people swear by
them.
For me, it’s just one more technology thingie to figure out. It’s more potential to
get a setting wrong … and wasting time tracking down which setting is creating the problem. That
annoys me enough to avoid it until someone proves fantastic value to overcome potentially wasted time.
I prefer to make use of filters to sort some of my email ahead of
time. You can also just make folders and
manually move each email as it comes in so that you see it as it comes.
Inbox Zero does that. I tried to open the site today, but couldn’t. Lots of other articles are available if you
are interested in that system.
I have set up an entirely different email for my market
studies so that I’m not sidetracked until I’m ready to engage with them. I don’t
want to see folders with 163 emails in them.
Too much pressure. We’ll see how
I like doing it this way.
Develop Folders To Suit Your Style
I made one for actionables … one for emails I must deal with and empty
often. Putting it there meant out of
sight for an uncluttered inbox, but readily accessible for action time. It's a favorite for bills or reminders to renew my car registration.
Another folder is for billing reference. I have this silly thing about holding my
payment receipt until the next billing cycle.
Makes me feel invincible in case someone says they didn’t receive my payment.
When I have a project I’m working on, I put “1” before the
name so the folder sits on top. It’s
more convenient for me to engage with it several times a day. Others might find that obnoxious … your
mileage may vary.
The Great Purge
I have folders from when I tried to create a system
before. Full of good things. Several hundred good things. In 54 folders. I’m slowly coming to accept that I must let go. If I haven’t read them by now, what makes me
think I’m likely to do so in the future?
It’s time to purge these, too.
To
borrow a Flylady-ism, organized clutter is still clutter. Yet, some of that is archived stuff I refer to and I
appreciate the organization.
You know by now I wrote this to myself to bolster my courage to tackle this beast of 1000's of emails. Good stuff mixed with stuff I'll never miss. But I will do this. Do you need to join me? Post below and we'll hold each other accountable!
Once I have done all of the unsubscribing I need to do, and
I shift things to their new folders, I won’t miss any more email – unless of
course my email provider is slow to get it to me.
A big part of my motivation is some email trouble. Some of yesterday’s email quietly sneaks into
my inbox 24-36 hours later and sits down with yesterday’s emails as if it
arrived yesterday, too. I already looked at
yesterday’s email, so I only look at the most recent arrivals. If my inbox is empty, I won’t miss them
anymore. Take that, slow email provider!
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Weekly Challenge
Last week has been about bits and pieces. Preparation details. My logo is still in process due to delays on
my end, then on his end. This morning I
received word that the revisions should be received today. It’s after 6 and I haven’t seen anything
yet. May just be a slow email thing and
I’ll have a notification in the morning.
Fingers crossed!
I’m still working on assigned reading. Apparently this week is the foundations week,
an introduction to the system. The 12
weeks starts next week.
Depending on how much spare time I have, I want to see my
main inbox reduced by 1000 emails. I
will make myself subscribe from 10 lists.
That’s going to hurt, because I like them … but I’m not reading
them. I will also change emails for the
marketing study lists that are still in my regular mail.
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