How To Cut Your Emails By 85%

I still remember the first time I tried email.

I was a junior in college. The year was 1997 and my immediate response was, “This is terrible. Why would anyone ever do this? This won’t catch on.”

Needless to say, I like to consider myself a bit of a tech visionary. Part of the problem is that at the time, checking email meant you logged into a complicated green and black screen system that made getting Matt Damon home from Mars feel easy.

Email has come a long way since then, but I’m still not a big fan. My biggest problem with it is that it gives me what I call, “Shallow Dopamine.” I realized that when I’m stuck on a big project and feeling a bit anxious, I open my inbox. I move a few things around, respond to a few inconsequential requests, delete a few old emails and then get a hit of dopamine. I feel a momentary wave of satisfaction as if I’ve accomplished something meaningful.

But it’s a shallow hit, because much like fighting the tide, as soon as I dig a hole in my inbox, the ocean rushes right back in. AND I’ve hidden from my most important work – writing a book.

What to do? What to do?

At the start of the year, I decided to make a stand. I’ve tried every single emailhack on the planet. I’ve done folder systems. I’ve practiced inbox zero. I’ve read books about deep focus and put myself through technology fasts. None of it worked for very long. This time, I decided to keep it simple. My new approach had only one rule.

Check email for 30 focused minutes Monday – Friday.

That was it. Instead of tapping into a steady IV drip of email all day long, checking it in the morning, in between meetings, in meetings, at lunch, all afternoon, at dinner and on the weekends when I’m supposed to be hanging out with my kids, I just decided to check it for 30 minutes a day, five times a week. That would cut the amount of time I’m spending on it from 10 hours to 2.5 hours.

On a Sunday afternoon, before the experiment started, I spent 90 minutes getting my inbox to 0. I wanted a fresh start in order to test whether thisworked.

The only thing more boring than maintaining your own inbox is reading a newsletter about someone else maintaining their inbox. So, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you what I learned when I did this for 30 days:

1.?When you spend less time sending emails, you receive less emails.

Go figure. Often, I’d miss a whole conversation thread and by the time I popped on, the team had already solved it without me. Yahtzee!

2.?I’m not that important.

The insecure part of me was hoping that the world would fall apart if I didn’t constantly monitor my inbox. I hoped someone would say, “Oh gosh, Jon, we need your wisdom on this issue immediately!” That didn’t happen. I’m not a doctor. I’m not saving lives with my emails. Turns out the majority of them can wait 24 hours.

3.?Picking the 30-minute window ahead of time was key.

On Monday, I’d pick Tuesday’s email time. (Usually between 1-3PM.) Knowing that I had it scheduled helped calm down my, “I gotta check it, I gotta check it!” anxiousness. If I got worried that I was missing some email, I could tell myself, “Chill, we’re scheduled to check it at 2PM today. We’re good.”

4.?No one really noticed.

I got back to everyone within 24 hours, which is actually faster than I was returning most emails when I was spending 10 hours a week on it. Why did thiswork? Because I wanted to get back to inbox zero everyday which made me respond in the moment versus avoiding difficult conversations.

5.?The only thing it cost was discipline.

I didn’t need expensive filtering software or a book or a course to figure it out. I just had to be disciplined, especially on the weekend. I was surprised how quickly my thumb went to the email icon on my phone whenever I was bored. I had to close it about 20 times because I had opened it without thinking.

6. It didn’t even take 30 minutes.

I tracked two data points because I’m a goal nerd like that – Total emails waiting for me and how many minutes it took to get rid of all of them. On average, there were 18 emails and it took me 19 minutes to empty them all out. I went from 10 hours a week in my inbox to 1.5 hours.

7. Flexibility was the key.

If at 9AM, I needed a file that was in my inbox to work on a project and I wasn’t planning to check my email until 3PM, I didn’t wait until the “official time.” I just went and got the file. I wasn’t too legalistic with the whole thing or I knew it would fail.

8. I wrote more. A lot more.

During the month that I was deliberate about email, I tripled my writing output. I wrote months of social media content, more than 10 newsletters and podcast episodes galore. If you close your escape pods, those distractions you use to hide from your work, guess what happens eventually? You get the work done.

9. It made me curious.

When you experience a tiny win in one part of your life, you naturally start looking for them in other parts. Discipline is contagious. After I got email under control, I wondered if I could get social media under control or snacking or being sarcastic when I feel uncomfortable. The email success encouraged me to go on a bigger exploration for bigger mountains.

Whenever I read ideas like this from other people, my big temptation is to ignore it by saying, “That would never work in my life.” And that’s probably true for you right now to some degree. Maybe you’re a nurse and you get patient updates via email that can’t wait for 24 hours. Maybe you work in finance at an email-driven company and being on top of your inbox is critical to your performance. Maybe you manage five salespeople and email is your preferred form of communication with them.

There are a million reasons my approach won’t work exactly for you, but then, it’s not supposed to. You should remix anything you read to your unique life and unique strengths. Take the pieces of this that apply to you, drop the ones that don’t.

What if you checked your email 5 times at day instead of 20?

What if you started moving the team you lead to a service like slack instead of email?

What if you tested a new approach by just taking off Sunday every week for four weeks in a row to see what would happen?

There are endless ways you can slice and dice email, but here’s what I know – Email will swallow every hour you give it. It will never tell you, “That’s enough.” It will never tell you, “I think you need to focus on that project instead.” It will never tell you, “You’re dopamine addicted to those notifications and haven’t held a single thought for longer than 10 minutes in 11 years.”

It's not email’s job to limit the hours we give it. It’s ours.

Make it a goal. Read this to figure out how.

Try your own approach for a week and see what happens.

If you don’t like this idea at all, feel free to email me your disappointment. Just don’t expect me to see it for about 24 hours.

Jon

(I wrote this for my free newsletter, the “Try This!” Sign up today to get ideas just like this, twice a month. www.Acuff.me/newsletter)