Based on a post by Michael Gray I embarked three weeks ago on an effort to minimize the emails I receive. Like many of you, I was getting on the order of 100+ emails per day. Now I don’t know if you are anything like me, but try as I might I kept checking my emails throughout the day. A long time ago I turned off the visible and audible alerts that Outlook used to throw at me every time I got a new email (though I still haven’t managed to do that for Tweetdeck updates – I need my tweets).  Despite that I’d spend a large part of my commute on the train every morning looking at my emails and deleting the ones I didn’t want and spend time checking for new mails throughout the day.

I wish I had the focus to ignore the emails that come in throughout the day and only look at them at predetermined times but I’m not that disciplined yet. The fact that they are there, unread and unanswered, bothers me and I need to do something about them. It’s something I’m working on…

In addition to the time it takes to look at and delete the emails, one of the biggest costs from all this email is the loss of focus. Every time you change gears mentally it takes time to get back into the groove of what you were doing. How much time and productivity do you lose every time you go back to that inbox and read or even just glance at  the new stuff that has arrived? I also get annoyed with spam and emails that I don’t want – and who needs more annoyances and negative emotions in their life?

The emails I get on a regular basis seem to fall into several categories:

• automated emails sending updates from Twitter, Facebook, Google Alerts, LinkedIn groups, etc.
• newsletters I either subscribed to at one point or from companies who bought my name
• email from someone who got my address from a tradeshow, webinar, etc.
• plain old spam
• automated emails from our internal systems sending status updates or daily reports
• actual communications from people I want to speak with
• “reply to all” or company wide emails that I really don’t need (no, I don’t know where your missing chopstick is and I don’t really need to be copied on the friendly insults you and another staff member are trading via email)

Cleaning Up the Mess

Most of these are fairly easy to deal with, for the automated emails I though about whether I really need to get that email or not. If not I invested the time to unsubscribe or change the frequency from daily to weekly. With the spam, some will inevitably get through but taking some time to flag the sender or the sender’s domain as spam is worth the time.

The emails that I found the most thorny to deal with were actually the internal ones. For the emails with status updates or for daily reports it took my asking another person to take time out of their day to remove me from the list. In some many cases I did go ahead and ask. For some of them I’m still waiting as, unbelievably, people do have higher priorities than helping keep my inbox clean. The ones that seem the hardest to avoid are the “reply all” or “send to team” emails. I suppose it’s human nature to take the easiest road and hit reply all or send to all rather than actually selecting who should get the email.  I also don’t want to come across as a stick-in-the-mud or a grumpy old man. I’m still working on dealing with those emails. In some cases I do send a polite “please stop copying me on this email thread” message. I’d love to hear how you deal with these kinds of emails.

Unsubscribe Hell

The most frustrating aspect of the project was the unsubscribe process. In some cases the sender required me to sign in with my login and password for a site I never signed up for. Rather than trying to get a password reminder emailed to me I just blocked their whole domain. In other cases the sender made the unsubscribe page as convoluted as possible or actually tried to get me to sign up for more emails with a negative opt-out. Others seem to be abusing the period they have to actually remove me from the list and flooding me with emails. While I understand the return most companies get from email I can’t help thinking of the damage to a company’s reputation from deceptive practices like this. Do you really want the last contact you have with me for a while to be pissing me off?

Was it Worth it?

Despite the time and effort to stop emails coming in that I don’t need or want, I think the experiment has been a success. Now my commute is spent planning my day and interacting online rather than cleaning my inbox. I actually feel calmer and less stressed when I look and see only a dozen or so emails waiting.

If you think it seems like too much effort to minimize the flow of emails, just do the math.

10 minutes /day * 250 work days / year = 41.7 hours / year

What would you do with an extra week of productivity per year?