62. Managing Email Inbox Chaos and Email Paralysis (Q&A)
Episode 62
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I answer two questions submitted by listeners of the show. Both questions are about managing email, and how to get our inboxes (and our reactions to them) under control.
Question 1: Where do I start when my entire email inbox is a mess? The unread emails are out of control and I'm tempted to delete everything and start fresh.
Question 2: Why do I feel paralyzed when I get an email that I need to respond to? I have no trouble writing emails, but whenever I get an email from someone asking me to do something or respond in some way, I keep putting it off for days or weeks, even though I know I shouldn't.
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
Episode 03: What’s an Admin Block and Why You Need One
Episode 15: Email Management Tips
✏️Enroll in SchoolHabits University (Curious? Check it out!)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉
62 Managing Email Inbox Chaos and Email Paralysis Q&A===
[00:00:00] Well, hello, listeners or watchers. Welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 62, and this is one of our monthly Q&A episodes, which means that I'm going to spend some time today answering questions that were submitted by listeners of the show. I am answering two questions today, and they're both about email.
To be honest, that is not a coincidence. I have a queue of questions that people have submitted, and today I deliberately picked two that are about the same topic. I thought that would be fun and sensible.
If you would like your own questions answered on a future Q&A episode, then you can head to learnandworksmarter.com.
Right there on the homepage, if you scroll down just a little bit, there is a super simple form. You can just enter your name and your question. I won't read your name on the show. You can ask about productivity or organization or something specific to your situation, school, work, or any of the topics that we cover here on the show.
Um, all right. So like I said, we've got two [00:01:00] questions about email today. For a comprehensive discussion about email management, I do want to send you over to episode 15 where I cover email management best practices for students and professionals. I go really in depth in that episode. Those core principles are really the foundation of a good email management system, but then some of the things that we talk about today you're going to find helpful too.
All right, with that, let's get started.
Okay. So I have my first question here, which I am going to read. I'm not sure if it was [00:02:00] submitted by a student or a working professional cause that information was not included on the form, but my answer wouldn't change if I had that information. All right. Um, so let's read it.
Where do I start when my entire email inbox is a mess?
The unread emails are out of control and I'm tempted to delete everything and start fresh. Thank you, Katie.
So the reason that I picked this question for today was just, well, it was a good question, but also just the other day, I was looking something up on my husband's phone because it was like the nearest phone to me, without me having to get up.
And I noticed that his email notifications for Gmail were something like 23,000 unread emails. It was 23,000 and then in change. Now, this is a judgment free zone. And I want that to be clear, but Oh my gosh, did that stop my heart?
My husband and [00:03:00] I are polar opposites in so many ways. And I always make sure that I have zero unread emails by the end of the week, at least, okay. Not every day, but by the end of the week. Then it got me thinking, how would he even begin bringing that number down to zero? Now, let me be clear, my husband has absolutely no intention of ever bringing that number down to zero. It doesn't bother him at all. But when I saw your question in the queue, it got me thinking that this is probably a question that other people have too.
So again, judgment-free zone. And if you told me that you had 23, 000 unread emails and they didn't bother you, and you were managing your email just fine and you weren't missing important deadlines and you weren't losing information in your email abyss, then that is absolutely your choice to keep all those unread emails.
But from your question, you are telling me that you want to do something with those emails. You do not [00:04:00] like that there are that many unread emails in there. So that's why my answer today is going to help you tackle that. Okay, but it's not coming from a place of you should tackle that. Okay. I don't should in here.
We all do things differently. And the important thing to think about is, does it work for you? If 23, 000 unread emails works for you, because it works for my husband somehow, then don't fix what ain't broke. Right.
But you did ask what's the best way to handle this. And you say that you're tempted to start from scratch.
And I, I don't know if you were saying that facetiously or like, if you think about it, most of what we say, like sarcastically or facetiously, or like as a joke, I'm air quoting, usually has some origin in truth. So I'm kind of thinking that you're actually considering that as an option. So let's talk about this.
Let's talk about what your options are. If you were to start from scratch, what would that look like? I'm assuming it, you know, doesn't mean deleting your email [00:05:00] account and creating a new one, although you could certainly do that. But I'm assuming you're asking, is it okay to just delete all the emails and start over from an empty inbox?
And here's what I'd say to that. You absolutely can. All right.
I would also say in this scenario, if you are not intending to go through those emails and handle them, which I'll talk about handling them and what that means in just a minute -I would opt to archive rather than delete.
Let me explain. Whether you're using Gmail or Outlook or Yahoo or whatever, you have the option to archive your emails. This removes them from your primary inbox, but it doesn't delete them forever. They're going to still show up in search results. You can still find them and open them if you need to, but they're not in your primary inbox taking up space.
On the other hand, when you delete something and you empty the trash, those emails are gone, right?
If you are choosing not to go through any of these emails, [00:06:00] maybe it is too overwhelming for you and it's, you know, you're like, you know what, these emails, I just, I don't even have the time to do it.
Now, I'm actually not suggesting, I am not advising that you don't go through any of these emails, unless the situation is like, you know what? That's my previous life and I for sure don't need them anymore. If for sure you don't need them anymore, get rid of them or archive them. Okay.
But if you're like, I don't know, maybe I need them. And I'm not sure if I do or not, then I would say select them all and batch archive them versus deleting them. Okay. If it ever turns out that someone's like, Hey, did you get my email about, you know, whatever you could do a search for that person's name, or you could search for a certain keyword. And if that were one of the emails that you had archived, it would show up in your search results and you would be fine.
Okay. So to recap, you could archive them all. And then from there, okay you would follow the steps and best practices I [00:07:00] talk about in episode 15 to manage your inbox going forward with the goal of not getting yourself in that situation again.
But here's what I suggest. If you do want to go the start-from-scratch route and you're willing to archive instead of just delete, you might want to do a quick pass through those emails from the last 90 days or so.
Right? So three months. So whatever day you start this project, count back 90 days. And from that point forward, you could do a quick run-through of the emails with one of two intentions. So I want you to put like two lenses on.
Number one, deleting obvious trash. If you see it and it's junk, get rid of it.
And then number two, processing all obvious important messages. So you would scroll back 90 days, maybe set a timer for 15-20 minutes. I do not want this to be like a multi-day event, okay? We're talking about just 90 days of emails. And you do a quick pass through your emails looking for [00:08:00] ones that are obvious trash.
That would be promotional emails, stuff that's obviously junk, things you know are no longer relevant because the date has passed or the event has passed. Obviously, you would never delete any emails that are part of my ReportCard newsletter that come from me, which if you're not signed up for, you can do that with the link in the description box, right?
But the other ones, you would just chuck in the trash and try to have no feelings about that.
Now, the purpose of this step is that it saves you from archiving pure junk, right? Now, the next pass through, I mean, it could also be at the same time, whatever, would be to run through the emails again. It's just in this 90 day period and look for obvious messages of value, maybe messages from family members, messages that can contain attachments of resources or PDFs that you might want to keep things like that.
Only you would know what's something of value, right? But the goal here is not, please hear [00:09:00] me loud and clear, the goal here is not to open up every email and analyze it and have an emotional response to it. Okay, this is quick thinking, quick assessment.
And then after 15 minutes or so, you would stop and you would either archive the remaining emails or you would delete them. Okay? I would not do this process for emails older than 90 days, because if anything older than that had been urgent, it would have made its way back into your inbox by now, right?
Now, another tip so that you don't end up archiving a ton of junk that's over 90 days old is that you could do a quick search, you know, in the top of your email, you know how to search in your email, obviously, for the name of a company that you get lots of emails for, let's say, Target, right? Search for Target.
And these are probably all promotional emails. You would select them all and mass delete them. All right, this would help avoid archiving a ton of target promotional emails. You could do this for a couple [00:10:00] companies, maybe Amazon, because all that information is stored in your Amazon account anyway, like you don't need to keep any emails from Amazon.
So you do a quick filter search for, Amazon, select them all, and then do a mass delete. And you could do this a few times, and then just go ahead and archive the rest and start fresh.
Now, if you wanted to take the second approach, which is to actually go through and process your emails, then there would be some overlap between that approach and what I just talked about.
Okay, but I would go back, if this is the way you want to go, you want to be a little more thorough about it, a little bit more intentional about it, you have this sort of nagging feeling that in those I'm just going to pick 23, 000. Okay, that's the number. That's how many unread emails you have. In those unread emails from the last year, you think that there really likely is something that you want to keep and you're scared to let that go,
then go back about a year and do something similar in that you're looking at each email that came in from the past year, and you're first [00:11:00] assessing if it's junk. If it is, then first unsubscribe if it's a promotional thing so that you don't continue to get any more. And then use the mass delete strategy that I just talked about.
That works great here.
And then for the emails that you decide have value and contain important information, your job becomes to think what you're going to do with that information. Like, where are you going to keep that information? I think the answer to these questions depends on what kind of emails you're getting, what kind of life you live.
If you're getting a lot of emails that contain attachments or information that you need to reference in the future, then you're going to need a final resting place, so to speak, for that kind of email. Are you going to create a new email inbox to drag those emails to? Maybe an inbox call like references or resources or something.
Are you going to download this attachments and save them in Google drive? [00:12:00] Right? See what I mean? It's a matter of what kind of emails that you're getting and what kind of information do you want to keep and where are you going to store that?
But the point is, if you're going to process all your unwritten emails from the past year and process, right, it means think about and organize and take action on. Okay. So you're going to have to decide what that looks like for you and where you are in school and life and career.
Okay. But again, you might consider only going back and doing this for the past year and then maybe archiving everything that's older than that. And then let me wrap this up by saying that everyone's idea of what a messy email inbox means is different.
You didn't give too many details in your question other than there were a lot of unread emails. So that's sort of what my advice pointed to. But if your idea of a messy email inbox is just that you have a lot of emails in there, but they've all been processed and they've all been handled at inappropriate time, then there's nothing to do with [00:13:00] those emails. You've already processed them. Okay. And in that case, if you're looking to start with a fresh inbox, you can just simply hit archive on all of them. You don't have to process them again, or you are free to leave them in there.
Our email clients come with so much storage and you know, emails that don't have heavy attachments consume hardly any data space at all.
So you are free to leave them in there if you want to.
Now I know I said that was my final point, but I just thought of another. And it's this. If by my email is a mess, you meant that you have multiple folders and labels and inbox rules, then my advice is to simplify. All the advice that I share on this show is to simplify.
I think that there are so few use cases to have complicated email rules that automatically pulled this email and put it in this folder and give it this color. Right. That is so complicated and [00:14:00] most of us do not need anything like that. If there is a certain type of email that you get regularly and you would find it helpful to separate that from the rest, then you can certainly create an additional folder or two.
But my advice is not to have any email rules. It would just be to drag the email and put it in the folder, You know, whenever you're processing your inbox, that is a very easy manual task that takes two seconds. And again, we don't need to have like feelings about that. Okay. I hope I answered your question.
And again, I highly suggest listening to episode 15, where I share strategies from managing email so that it doesn't get to that chaotic state to begin with. Okay. Let's move on to our second question, which I have right here.
Here we go. Thank you for the chance to submit our questions. You are so welcome. [00:15:00] Something I've been wondering, that is kind of a weird question, but I want your advice, is why do I feel paralyzed when I get an email that I need to respond to? I have no trouble writing emails, but whenever I get an email from someone asking me to do something or respond in some way, I keep putting it off for days or weeks, even though I know I shouldn't.
When I finally do respond, it takes me so little time that I'm embarrassed I waited that long. Thank you.
All right, so this is another question that personally resonated with me, even though I do my best to stay on top of my inbox. In fact, I saw a meme the other day, and I actually shared it to my story on Instagram.
Do you guys follow me on Instagram? Do that. It's @schoolhabits. That's fun. Um, I like, I like people. And I share weird stuff. Um, but it felt so relatable. It was about like, I don't know, it was like, God, why do you give me your hardest battles? And God's like, um. You're actually my weakest soldier and it's not a battle, it's just an email.
That was funny. Anyway, it was about the paralysis and the fear that we get [00:16:00] around an email that we have to deal with and I thought it was funny and then I saw your question in the queue and I figured, what the heck, let's do this. So, first things first, it's super normal. Some emails give me a pit in the stomach, too.
Hey, I think that some of our visceral reaction to emails has to do with our history and our experiences and our relationships with people demanding our time and attention, our tolerance for discomfort, our ability to admit when we don't have the answer, and then how resourceful we are in finding that answer.
There are lots of factors at play here. But here's the thing, and I'll bet it's something that you already know, not dealing with emails that need to be dealt with always leads to more stress. We know that, right? Yet time and time again, we see that email in our inbox and we let it sit there for days, for weeks, right?
Which is like rubbing salt in our own wounds. I know the feeling because like I said, I do it too, [00:17:00] but here's how I see it. I think there's kind of a two-pronged approach here. One is more, um, mindset muscle based and the other is strategic and tactical. So let's start with the mindset muscle. I don't, I don't know if mindset muscle is the right way to describe it, but that's all I can come up with on the spot.
So we're going to go with it. But what I'm, what I'm referring to is this idea of consciously and intentionally kind of forcing ourselves to take action when we don't want to. Right, whether it's replying to an email or working on a task that we don't love or making that phone call that we've been avoiding, we're always going to be faced with tasks that we don't want to do for whatever reason.
They're emotionally triggering, they're hard, they're unclear, a hundred thousand different reasons why we avoid things, right? So, our practice is to be intentional about recognizing when we're in these moments, pausing in these moments, calling out [00:18:00] these moments, naming these moments, and taking action anyway.
Alright, so it could be something like, you know, you're sitting at your desk and an email comes in and it gives you that pit in your stomach, right? You know you have to reply to it, but your default response is to tell yourself you'll reply tomorrow, which as we know is not likely to happen. Now in this moment, our goal is to say, whoops, I'm doing it again.
Whoops. This is my pattern. Whoops. Let me see if I can break this default behavior and then reply to the email. All right, now this might take some time. You might get to the first step, which is just recognizing the story we tell ourselves about I'll reply to the email later, right? You might get to the point where you're just saying to yourself, whoops, I'm doing it again.
This story is false. And then continue to ignore the email, right? And that's okay in the beginning. Recognizing an unwanted behavior is the first step in changing it. [00:19:00] Okay. But then over time, the goal is to say, whoops, I'm doing it again and then take action. And again, this goes for any task that we're feeling complicated about, not just email.
Essentially, this is all under the umbrella of emotional regulation, the ability to say, I have feelings about this thing. You might not know why they exist. You might not know where those feelings are coming from. You might not understand how deep-rooted they are, whatever. You're just saying, I have feelings about this thing, and that's okay.
Those feelings are going to be there. And as they're, as they're sitting here, my little feelings, I am going to take action on this task anyway. Because action is not feeling. Your actions can happen despite the feelings. Right? Your actions can happen with feelings or without feelings. Right? That's the ability to regulate our emotions.
Now this is where we get into the tactical or strategic approach because when we don't have a clear way to do something, when we're feeling [00:20:00] ambiguous about something, when we don't have a tried and true method, you know, and we, and we don't have a plan that can derail all of our good intentions. So do you have a good email management process?
This is where I'm, again, going to direct you to episode 15, because that is really important here. If a significant amount of your school or work communication involves email, you have to have a system for managing that tool. Because email is essentially a tool, right?
So, I go over this in depth in episode 15, but every email that comes in your inbox essentially fits into one of three categories.
It's either junk, which means you can delete it, you know, right away. That's a really quick, easy win. Or, it contains information that you need to do something with, like a date that you need to put on your calendar, a file that was sent to you that you need to save for future reference. Maybe, um, it's an answer that you're receiving to a question that you asked at some point.
So this is information [00:21:00] that you are extracting from the email and putting somewhere. Usually it's in your information management system, maybe something like your calendar, okay? And then the last type of email contains an action item. Somebody might send you an email and ask you to do something. They're asking you a question, which means you have to answer it.
You get an email that says, Hey, can you get me this information by the end of the week? Okay, well now you need to do something and get somebody some piece of information by the end of the week. These types of emails go on your task management system because they're actions. And to be honest, these tend, for most of us, to be the emails that cause the most paralysis, to use your word.
If we're just receiving information from somebody that usually doesn't give us too many emotions, it's like, oh, okay, cool, Charlie sent me the meeting notes, great, no emotion. But, here's an email from Elizabeth that's asking me to find the answer to a question that [00:22:00] I don't know. It's asking me to take an action that I'm uncomfortable with or unfamiliar with, then BAM!
Pit in the stomach. I'm going to avoid this email to avoid the pain of facing what this email is asking me to do. So, that's what we need to address. So let's break this down. Do you have a dedicated time in your schedule to address emails? Let's start there. Do you give yourself an admin block periodically?
Maybe, you know, once a day or a couple of times a week, a couple of times a week, right? Where you're intentionally sitting in front of your inbox and handling what is in there. We talk about the admin block strategy in episode three. This is where you set aside, it's kind of like a meeting with yourself, essentially, where you're just handling all the administration tasks of whatever it is that you do.
For many of us, email is an administration task. If you know that every Monday and Friday [00:23:00] from 12 to 1, you have time to process your email inbox, and you're giving yourself a dedicated block in your schedule on those days to do that, then you're probably going to lessen your emotional response to emails that come in on Thursday, for example, because you're like, okay, I'm going to handle that tomorrow during my admin block.
And I'm going to hold myself accountable to that meeting I made with myself because I'm dependable and reliable. And I'm going to handle my emails then. That is very different than what we often do and what seems like you have a pattern of doing according to your question, which is telling ourselves that we are going to handle the email tomorrow or later.
But we don't actually have a plan or the time or the space to do that later at all. Alright, so the first step here is to make sure that you are giving yourself an intentional time in your day or your week to handle what's in your inbox. The second strategy here [00:24:00] is to make sure you have a task management system that can house these action items that are coming at you through email.
If you're using your email inbox as a task management system, that is of course going to create stress and email mismanagement. Now, it's perfectly fine to keep the emails in your inbox if you wanted to. I kind of alluded to that in my answer to the last question, but it's also important to extract that info from the email and put it in your task management system so that it becomes real.
When something is real, because it exists in a dedicated task management system, it's more likely to get done. Okay, so, so far we're ensuring that you have a time to handle your emails, probably in an admin block, um, during the day or a couple times a week or whatever you need. And then ensuring that you have a task management system where you are storing your to do list items that come to you through email.
And another [00:25:00] helpful approach might be to think about what kind of emails specifically you find overwhelming and paralyzing. Are the emails that are asking you questions that you don't know the answer to? Okay, well how can you address that? Why are there so many questions coming your way that you don't have the answer to?
Could you make yourself a, you know, a guide or a personal FAQ reference sheet where you store templated answers to common questions that you get so you don't have to like start from scratch every time? Would that be helpful? Are you getting a lot of emails that require you to think deeply and complexly and write a detailed response to, okay, well, maybe the resistance comes from the effort it takes to type up your email reply.
I know personally, that's a point of resistance for me when I have, let's say a parent of one of my maybe like high school students, like one of my younger students writing an email asking, how is my kid doing? Right? Super basic question. Probably took them six seconds to write [00:26:00] it. And it's a very fair question and they deserve to know.
But my answer to that question is complex. And it may take me 45 minutes to type up. Sometimes longer. Right? And that's usually when I pick up the phone and I have a phone call or I schedule a phone call for some time during the week. For me, that's the approach to lessen the resistance. Okay? Is that something that you could try?
Okay. The deeper work here, that's what I'm saying, is to try to figure out, you know, specifically what are you resisting? What kinds of emails do you find paralyzing? What are these emails asking of you? And when you can figure that out, then you can ask yourself the question, Okay, what can I do to make this easier?
How can I make myself less emotional when it comes to these emails?
How can I increase my emotional regulation when I see these emails? You have to know the exact problem that you're dealing with before you can find a solution, you know?
[00:27:00] And then, one final tip, unless I think of another one as I'm saying this, but, and I doubt this is going to be relevant for every kind of email that comes in, but I'm just going to share it in case you find it helpful, emails don't have to be that complicated. In fact, nobody likes reading emails that are just big chunks of paragraph text.
If your default response to emails, to an email that you get in, it's like, ugh, like replying to this is going to be such a hassle, then maybe the skill is to work on language consolidation, brevity, saying what you need to say with fewer words. Right, this is a communication skill that is very helpful across multiple contexts.
It's helpful to the person receiving the email, but it's also helpful for you because it makes you more efficient.
All right, folks, that takes us to the end of the show here. You can find a transcript at learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/62. That is because this is [00:28:00] episode 62. I hope you found this email-centered episode helpful, and that it gives you some ideas to maybe look at your own email management system and scrutinize your own habits and ask yourself, where can I tighten up? Where can I reduce the friction? Where can I streamline? These are all really great questions to ask ourselves now and again. And one more question.
If you would be so kind and you've been enjoying the show, I would love for you to subscribe on YouTube. I'm trying to grow that channel and it's pretty slow moving. Or if you've been enjoying this on a podcast app and you could leave a review that truly makes all the difference in the world, I appreciate you.
Thank you for spending your time with me. And remember, never stop learning.
