Taming Your Email

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

Email’s a weird thing. It’s one part revolution, making communication faster and easier than it’s ever been before, and allowing people to connect on an instant, simple level. It’s also one part time-sink, one part source of stress, and one part constant overwhelm thanks to the never-ending stream of emails that tends to boil up into everyone’s inboxes.

Love it or hate it, you really can’t avoid using email these days. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t want to – the advantages and uses are too many to lose out to the pain I feel in my soul thanks to the 15765 emails sitting in my email inbox at the moment.

So, since we’re stuck with it no matter how we feel, the only real solution is just to make email work a little better for us.

Here’s a few ideas:

Only Use One

I know personally, I have a huge number of emails, for different purposes and positions, that all demand my attention every once in a while. Remembering each of them, and then actually checking them, takes a lot more time than I feel like spending on my email. Instead, I’ve just forwarded every one of my emails to one address (in this case, my Gmail account), and I deal with them all there.

Gmail’s great for this, because it’ll let you send emails from different accounts as well. It makes receiving and sending emails from a ton of different accounts every bit as easy as it would be from only one account – a huge time-saver.

Work Online and Offline

I regularly use two different email systems – Thunderbird and Gmail. Gmail’s where I do most of my work, and spend most of my email time. Every once in a while, though, I’ll download all my email into Thunderbird (using a POP account) and work from that instead.

This serves two important purposes: one, it creates a local backup of all my emails, meaning that if I ever lose or get locked out of my Gmail account, I don’t lose all my emails. Two, it means that if I’m offline, I can access, reply to, and compose emails and then sync them when I go online again. I like Gmail better, but having a local copy I can work with offline is crucial.

Filter

One mindset that has helped me deal with email a lot faster and more ruthlessly is deciding that my inbox was only for urgent messages, and that anything that wasn’t that way should be moved – or never get there in the first place.

Much of my email comes regarding a few things – either mailing lists I’m on, notifications from things like Twitter and Facebook, and from companies trying to sell me things because I visited their website one time. So, using Gmail (though basically any other email client can do this too) I set up a few key filters that keep the things out of my inbox that don’t need to be there. I can get to them when I have time to, and they don’t distract from the things that actually need my attention.

Leverage the Shortcuts

Most email clients these days have shortcuts, or little tips and tricks, to make dealing with your email a little bit faster. Each one might only save you a second or two, but over time it’s a huge change in the speed with which you can deal with a lot of email. Here are some of the best shortcuts for Gmail, for Mac’s Mail.app, for Thunderbird, for Outlook, and for Yahoo! Mail.

Unsubscribe

Deleting one email only takes a second or two. Deleting the 17 emails you get every day from 1-800-Flowers.com takes a lot longer than you think. Instead of just deleting these emails or worse, letting them pile up in your inbox, take the time to go through and unsubscribe from the emails.

At the bottom of most of those emails (Ticketmaster, LiveNation, and the New Jersey Nets are my biggest offenders) is an unsubscribe button, and in a couple of clicks you’ll have substantially reduced the amount of email you get – and the money you have to pay for a therapist to help you deal with it all.

There’s much, much more that can be done to help you manage all the emails that pile up and cause us nothing but stress and anxiety (and carpal tunnel, if you’re me), and I’m going to hit on a number of others in a post coming this week. But, for now, reducing both the number of places you have to go to get emails, and the number of emails you get that you don’t need to, is a great place to start.

How do you tame your email?

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