· productivity timemanagement

Cutting down on email overload

Time is very scarce and especially when you have a two year old kid who is vying for all your attention. Over the past few months it has been very hectic both at work and home. A direct consequence of this is a huge premium on my time (not that it was cheap earlier). On my quest to better manage myself and my time, I am constantly on the lookout for some practical solutions. One of them being optimizing email.

Both my work email and personal email have been subscribed to many seemingly useful content. In the past I used to go through all of them over the weekends or in some cases daily. Over a period of time these mails grew to over a hundred a day in my personal inbox. Even the simple task of selecting them and deleting them would take a few minutes. On the top of it, just looking at the huge list of emails made me postpone the necessary action. Another downside of such a huge list was I also used to miss out on important communication.

It was not very different situation with the work email. Apart from subscriptions, I had 100’s of cron job mailers ending up in the inbox. Though I had filters to skip the Inbox, they were clearly not good enough, and I was too lazy to correct them.

Last weekend I made up my mind to unclutter my life. What it meant was going through all the various emails which have only good to read value and unsubscribe from them or change the notifications to a digest or weekly. Looks like these changes started paying off. Two days since the changes both my inboxes had only mails that I want to look at. There were a few mails which I missed to unsubscribe the other day. Today I cleaned them up too.

The next step is to start looking at Inbox zero. Though I don’t subscribe to various methodoogies of inbox zero (tried many without success), I believe in the concept. Over the next 30days my target is to reach inbox zero on both personal (mandatory) and work (stretch). Will update on how it went on 12th Feb 2014.

  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • Pocket
comments powered by Disqus