Is Email Killing Your Time? Reclaim It with These Tips

Brief

Email can become a de facto to-do list hanging over your head, and the long-term solution is to rethink your email habits, writes Robin Copple. “Your mission moving forward: have email be a resource you parse through in the morning, and check periodically but not obsessively,” Copple writes.

Insight

I just reset my email. Took my unread count down to zero. Archived or deleted everything that was sitting in my inbox. And everything feels different now.

More than any other possible binary the world presents us, I believe there are precisely two types of people in this world: those whose unread email count sits at or well above 1,000, and those who have their life somewhat in order.

I remember when we all first started to get iPhones, and we all were kind of looking over each shoulders to see how different people arranged their apps, and consequently, their burgeoning digital lives.

The only apps that were truly constant for everyone that I ever saw were Messages, their music player, and email. (By the way: imagine being the type of person who moves their “Phone” app off of their home page? But hey, I saw them and they exist.)

We all use email. And your approach to email says a lot about you.

There are people out there who still use Yahoo Mail. There are also people who still use AOL Mail! There are even people who have managed to keep their devices around a certain generation of technology where to this very day, in 2022, that classic little computer voice will still say “You’ve got mail!”

None of these methods are incorrect. We all experience email in different ways. For some of us, it’s integral to our work. For others, communication has largely moved to all sorts of other chat apps and communication portals of choice. Yet, email has a staying power.