Can you tame the email beast?
It’s a constant battle, but it’s worth having
I’ve been away longer than anticipated because I was trying something out: taming my email. And I think I’ve finally found some success.
My old method
Now, I have always had a somewhat strict approach to handling my email, similar to Inbox Zero. Every morning I would start my day by dealing with the mountain of email that had accumulated since I was last online. This consisted mostly of deleting unwanted emails.
I would never clear everything out, though. I would leave anything that I either needed to deal with at some point in the future (filing it away would mean forgetting it forever) or that I wanted to keep in an easy-to-find place. This included things like recipes from friends and instructions from the animal shelter for my foster kittens. I would try to keep the inbox around 50, and if it reached 100, I knew I needed a clean out.
But the constant stream of incoming emails had gotten overwhelming. There was so much deleting, and it was such a waste of time.
The solution
So I spent a week unsubscribing from emails and blocking others as spam. A lot of these came from companies that I had once bought a product from. Others were from universities, businesses and others that had gotten my email as a journalist. They all distracted me from finding emails that were actually important.
Often, unsubscribing once didn’t work. I had to do it multiple times. And if that didn’t work, I just marked it as spam. Gmail makes all this pretty easy. (Outlook much less so, which is why I haven’t yet tackled that account in a similar way.)
After a week, I went from having more than 100 emails every morning to around 20 to 40. I still have to unsubscribe from a few more, but I finally feel like I have things under control, and I can find and read the emails that I really care about.
In the end, this was pretty simple and just required attention for about a week. If you’re starting from an inbox with hundreds or thousands of emails, I would suggest taking it all and sticking it in an archive folder to start. Clear it all out and start fresh.
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An update from last time
Thanks to Rebekah White for writing to me with an update. Last time, I had tried to find a solution to her problem coordinating schedules across time zones. She ended up using World Time Buddy. (And she has also tried Workona, ToDoIst and Airtable, based on advice from previous columns.) I’m so glad I could help.
If you have a problem you’d like a solution for, you can email me at sciwriter.sarah@gmail.com or submit it through my handy form.
What I’m reading
Neurodivergent writers, you might be interested in this recent post from Ask A Manager. A reader with ADHD, learning disabilities and suspected autism wrote in asking for advice on succeeding in the workplace as a neurodivergent. Alison Green opened up the question to the Ask A Manager community, and the result is a comment section full of hundreds of ideas for what might help.
And even if you’re not neurodivergent, there are lots of ideas that everyone might find useful.
Until next time!
— Sarah
P.S. If you’ve got a question, comment or idea for a future newsletter, please email me at sciwriter.sarah@gmail.com. If you have a problem you’d like help with or have advice to share with your fellow writers, you can submit this through this Google Form.
And if someone forwarded this to you (hint, hint), check out the archive to see what you can expect from The Systematic Scribe. Plus, this post has my FREE Airtable template for running a freelance writing/editing business.
If you got this far, I can confess that the foster kittens (this is Marjorie) have been a wonderful distraction the last few weeks. Who can blame me?