Email Management: How to Deal with Email Overwhelm

You turn on your computer, and before your day has even begun, you are feeling overloaded and overwhelmed. You have 50 new messages, plus all the ones you have yet to get to from earlier in the week (and month, and year!). Email, as you know, can be a cause of great convenience and also great stress.

Email overwhelm can be caused by the quantity or the quality of your messages. Sometimes the sheer number of messages is stressful, whereas, other times, the content of the messages throws us off. Because of this, email overwhelm needs to be dealt with at two levels, the psychological and the practical.

Psychological Causes and Solutions to Email Overload

Dealing at the psychological level requires asking yourself what about email is overwhelming you, and if there is a similar pattern in other areas of your life as well (usually there is). For example, are you overwhelmed by the number of request made of you by email, and if so, are you overwhelmed by people asking you to do things in general?

Are you overwhelmed by the amount of time it takes to go through emails, and if so, do you feel pressed for time in general? More specifically, do you get annoyed by spam or messages that should not be sent to you? And if so, do you feel frustrated that people interrupt you or waste your time in other ways.

Once you know the psychological cause and result, you can use strategies to address both. For instance, in the first example, you can work on your assertiveness skills to say no to inappropriate requests made of you, and your delegation skills to free yourself up to do what you do best.

In the second example (of feeling pressed for time), you can look for ways to boost your energy, such as exercise and nutrition. If you feel that you’re often interrupted by others, you can look for ways to create boundaries around your time and attention, such as by having office hours (like professors have) when people can come to you with issues, rather than an open door policy.

Practical Causes and Solutions to Email Overload

The most common practical cause of email overload is not having a solid organization and filing system. You let your inbox fill up to 200 (or 2,000!) messages and of course you become overwhelmed when you have to deal with them.

Dealing at the practical level involves setting up a system of email management that does not require you to make decisions about what to do with each message. For example, you create a system in which you keep only urgent and important messages in your inbox, file all others in their respective folders and go through these folders twice a week.

I have a rule that I cannot have more than 30 messages in my inbox- everything else needs to be acted on, deleted, or filed. Be careful that you don’t get into the habit of filing messages away never to see them again unless they are messages that you’ll never need to take action on (but they have helpful information so you want to keep and file them.

What are three steps that you can do today to recognize the cause of your email overwhelm and start to solve it?

Here are more resources on reducing stress (these ones are based on improving communication skills).

Comments

[Kevin]

As someone new to internet marketing, I understand the e-mail marketing problem.

I am subscribed to way too many e-zines & newsletters. But, I do open most & learn from their content. Eban Pagan states it best that e-mail is a great tool, but a terrible time waster as well. I know of some people that only open up their e-mail accounts once, maybe twie a day so as to not to become distracted & then further involved (replying, composing, etc.)

That all said, when we launched our first, original site three weeks ago, I had a goal in mind.

It's a blog-driven, charity-based site honoring servicemen & women of our (U.S.) Armed Forces. There is no autoresponder to opt into, so no e-mail marketing.

Granted, I am missing out on a lot of marketing, but that is what I chose. These brave men & women take the time out of their day to write & submit their stories to us-> there is no way that I will bother them with e-mails offering them products & services to sell. They know where to find those things on our site. And, if I should mention a product in the blog, OK. At least they were not bombarded with e-mails (at least not from this site). I have over 1280 more sites that I'll be developing, so if they want e-mails from us, they can sign up to then on any of the other sites.

Best to you!

[Marc]

A rule that you cannot have more than 30 messages in your inbox is wonderful-- except when you start checking your email at 11:00 A.M., and you have 42 messages. Then, while you are still checking your email at 12:00 P.M., there are still 42 messages! (New ones have arrived since you started reading) This actually happens to me on a all-too-frequent basis.

What I've found is that I have to set absolute, strict limits on how much marketing I will accept-- and how much I won't. For instance, unless there is *incredible* value added from a particular marketer, I generally will not accept more than 1 email from them every 24 hours. 2 or more in 24 hours gets an instant unsubscription from their list.

Certainly, I may miss out on some valuable content, but (as one example) I had one marketer send me 6 emails recently in 24 hours, since they had just launched a product, and were inept in setting up their servers to deliver the product. For some reason, they felt the need to shoot me an email each time their servers went down, then back up, then down... Dude... if you can't pick a competent hosting company, that's your fault. It's my fault if I stay subscribed to your list after such idiocy.

Yes, I know product launches are exciting for you, but be reasonable. Treat your subscribers' time like the valuable resource it truly is, and one day, you'll be rewarded appropriately.

[Larina Kase]

Marc- I agree, these rules about keeping inbox size below a certain size are definitely challenging. I book a couple of hours on Fridays to get my inbox down because I love starting Monday with a manageable inbox.

That is a great idea about marketing messages. I agree with the idea that just because something is important to you (and you feel the need to send out 10 messages) doesn't means it's that important to me!

One exception to opt-out with more than one message/24 hours: If you get an email with a product offer and decide to get the product, you purchase it and then you get an autoresponder (usually from the same email address) with the product itself or shipping info. This would result in a couple emails within a short period of time and could unsubsribe you from a resource you find valuable.

[Larina Kase]

Kevin,
I love how you're being strategic in your use of email marketing for your blog-driven charity site.

It is a good idea to check email twice a day at designated times. The problem with checking randomly throughout the day is that you don't realize how much time goes into that and it makes you go back in forth in your focus which drains mental energy.

That said, whether twice a day is possible really depends on the nature of your business. I do a fair amount of work with the media and if I didn't get back to a journalist until the next day, the story would already be in press.

Even though everything FEELS urget we need to be honest with ourselves about whether it truly is, and if not, I think checking twice per day (such as 10am and 3pm) is great.

[Alex]

Larina,

Great read on the tolls of email overload. This is actually the first I've read about the psychological impact of this problem and I found it very interesting.

I'd like to offer another practical solution for you and your readers with our new email service, OtherInbox.

By giving the user the ability to create new email addresses on the fly with their own domain name (facebook@you.otherinbox.com, etc…), we can give you the power to manage these emails better. New folders are automatically created for each address so you can better organize your newsletters/alerts/notifications and, if necessary, block an address entirely due to spam.

Here’s the URL for the invite to our private beta:

http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/pascoaching

By utilizing OtherInbox, you can entirely cut out these problematic (but ultimately wanted) emails from your work life, reading them on your own time in a managed and organized way.

I hope you enjoy trying us out, and I look forward to reading any thoughts or comments you might have on your blog.

Thanks!

~The OtherInbox Team

[Larina Kase]

Cool resource, Alex, thanks for sharing!

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