For some of us, being able to completely ditch email would be a dream. The pileup of correspondence and notifications can become distressingly excessive. Former Lifehacker editor Kevin Purdy recently spent a week without email for ITworld—and it brought along its own kind of anxiety. A lot of what makes email seem unbearably unmanageable is a lack of structure. As Purdy says, the things that make it terrible are actually the same things that make it great. Namely, the fact that anyone can reach you with any kind of news, and prioritizing it all can go a long way:
“If you know that most of the good email that comes through gets your attention, you can rest your mind when it comes to the other stuff. When you get to it, too, you can plow through it quickly, because you can trust that you will notice the difference between “Jim Rogers wants to connect on LinkedIn” and “You are invited to speak, expenses paid, at a conference in Lyon, France.”
There are many ways to help make email more productive, and many of the things that Purdy decides to implement upon returning to his Gmail inbox are all worth checking out:
- Unroll.me to get a handle on your subscriptions
- Scheduling set times for checking email
- Prioritizing using fliters and labels
It might seem like a little bit of a hassle at first, but once you put in the initial amount of work, you’ll start dreading your inbox much less. Be sure to hit the link and read the whole thing, it’s great: 7 days without email: Taming the tyrant
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