Episode 109: Email Is Eating Your Day. Here's How to Take It Back
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
I'll be honest with you... my inbox is a mess. Between my personal and business email, I've completely let things slide, and it even cost me a registration deadline for my daughter's gymnastics class. So, this month, I'm doing a full reset, and I'm bringing you along for the ride.
In this episode, I'm walking you through the exact email management philosophy I swear by (even when I'm not following it), my step-by-step process for sorting through thousands of emails without losing my mind, and most importantly, what actually went wrong the last time I had things under control. Because getting organized is one thing. Staying that way is where most of us fall apart.
If you've ever done a big inbox cleanout only to find yourself right back where you started a few months later, this episode is for you. We're talking batching, folder systems, the difference between sorting and processing your email, and why assuming it will "just happen" is exactly why it doesn't.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode. Hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I fell off the horse. It happens to the best of us. We have a good thing going on, we are in our routine. Our systems are working, and then life gets busy. I know right now that's probably happening to so many of you as you transition into summer, wrap up the school year, all of the things, and I'm just here to normalize that experience, that even as someone who teaches and coaches on the topic of simple, repeatable systems, routines that support your life, that make things easier, that I too have that experience where I just let something go or step away from it for a time, and today I'm talking about my inbox. I have completely neglected my inboxes. I'm gonna say both, my personal and my business inbox. If you scroll way back, you'll even hear a podcast episode, episode 69, where I shared all about my inbox management system, how I got everything sorted, and how good it felt to know that I wasn't missing things. Well, between then and now, I have let that go, and a few weeks back, I missed an important registration deadline email for my daughter's gymnastics class. Luckily, I was able to sort it out. They were able to accommodate me, but I do not enjoy being that person. And I wanna assure you, I didn't beat myself up over it. It makes perfect sense that this is what has happened. I am managing a lot, as are you, and it did work out, and it was fine, but I have decided that enough is enough And so getting my personal inbox to start, and I'll move to my business one next, but getting my personal inbox back to the state where it feels manageable, where I know what's in there, I can see and have visibility into the emails that are coming, is my project for this month. And if you follow me on Instagram, I'm even sharing my journey over there. I've made a couple of reels so far to walk you through the process and why I'm tackling this and how it's going as I check in week by week on the sorting, the deleting, the unsubscribing, all of that. And my goal in doing this is not just to sort through everything that's there. I do need a big sort. There's just so many emails in there. But once I get through the sorting, my goal is to follow through on a system for managing it, and that is the step where so many of us fall down. Maybe we do a big decluttering. We empty out the fridge. We sort through our socks or the junk drawer, and then we are right back where we started days, weeks, or months later because we didn't have a system to keep it that way, or we didn't follow through on the system that we set out to follow. Email is a frequent topic That comes up in coaching, and it makes sense. It is a huge part of daily life. I imagine that here shortly that will start to include text messages because that is yet another area that we have to manage and sort, and it's already including or expanding to include Teams messages or whatever chat tool you use at your work. It is a big piece of how we spend our time, and most of us want to be doing more actual work and less time in our inboxes Because if we spend all of our time in our inboxes, it is really hard to get to that Eisenhower Matrix quadrant of the important but not urgent work. Emails always feel more important. Teams messages always feel more important. And too many of you are using your inbox as a to-do list even though you know that's not the most important work. That is not the work that moves your goals forward or gets you recognized as a leader, as a strategic thinker. That just earns you the reputation of being responsive. And yet, email is a part of our lives. It is a part of your job responsibilities. So how do we manage it? How do we balance it with all of the other work that we need and want to be doing? And how do we sustain that management? In today's episode, I wanna walk you through the email philosophy that I so desperately want to follow, the one that the horse that I want to get back on, as well as the process I'm going to take for sorting everything to a manageable baseline, and then what I think went wrong over these last few months in my ongoing maintenance, and what I'm going to do this time around to solve for that. So just for a quick background, if you've not been here since the beginning to hear how things used to go in managing my inbox, years and years ago, back when my oldest was probably very young, I declared email bankruptcy, this idea that you just decide that the thousands or hundreds of emails that are in your inbox, you just drag them all into maybe an archive or to be sorted later folder, and you start fresh. If anything really was important, someone would reach back out, or you would always have the capability to search for it. Well, I declared that email bankruptcy and did not have lasting results. Very quickly, my inbox accumulated right back to the number that it was before, if not larger, because I did not have a process to manage it I quickly fell back into old habits of only addressing the important things, and I ended up right where I started. So last year, I sorted all of my thousands of emails in both inboxes, my personal and my business inbox, and I tried to implement a sorting and managing technique that I learned from the book Uptime. It's called Uptime: A Personal Guide to Productivity and Wellbeing. I will put the link to that book in the show notes for this episode, which again, you can always find at themothernurture.com/podcast. And I remember the feeling. It did feel really good to have it all sorted. It was cathartic in a way. It felt really good to know that I wasn't missing things. It's similar to a to-do list. When you capture things on this running list, you can know that they're not falling through the cracks. They are there for you. You won't forget. And I remember it feeling so calming to open up my inbox. I hadn't realized how much the sheer volume of emails was weighing on me. When you open an inbox multiple times a day, I remember that feeling of seeing and knowing that I wasn't missing anything, and that was so reassuring. But then life happens. You have a couple of busy weeks. Maybe you take a trip, do some travel. Maybe everyone gets sick or you are sick. There's illness. And you just have to do less. You have to focus on what is truly urgent or what is the priority in that season. And as I said, that's okay. I'm not upset with myself, and you shouldn't be either. It's not a failure on your part. It just is. And that is a piece I really want you to hear. Your goal in life is not to always have a managed inbox. If you do, you're probably spending too much time on it. That is an indicator that I notice when working with the clients that I work with. If responses are coming at all hours of the day and very quickly, I know that the inbox is the most important thing in that person's day-to-day life, and it doesn't need to be. But the goal here is to know how to come back to a place that feels good enough for you. And for months, my inbox has been good enough. Yes, there has been a high volume of messages sitting in there, but I, I was able to zero in on and manage the important things. But it took missing that email to get my attention, and here I am, ready for a bit of a reset, and maybe you are too. So here's my process for sorting. There are so many ways to go about this, but for me and for any big project that I want to take on, it's about breaking it down. So that's what I did. I took the total number of messages that are in my inbox, divided it by the number of days in May, and gave myself a target. At a minimum, I needed to sort through two hundred and... I think it was, like, two hundred and forty emails a day, right? I know how many emails I need to delete or file or do something with each day to get through all of them by the end of the month. I even created a little checklist for myself. , I use OneNote to track a lot of these types of things, so I would know by the end of this week, I should be here, and by the end of week three, I should be here, to just give myself that visual benchmark and to make it feel like I could do this. I wasn't staring at thousands of emails today. I just needed to do a hundred or two hundred. I sorted initially by sender. I found grouping in that way was much easier for me to see patterns, to delete in bulk, to also unsubscribe as I go, right? Rather than reacting to a sale email or someone telling me I should read something, I get to instead proactively choose, out that retailer to see if they have a sale rather than being confronted with it in my space. And I'm okay with that, right? I don't, I don't need to be staring at all of these things that might just have me consuming more than I really want to be consuming anyway. So it's also been a great opportunity for me to get rid of some of the junk and the people and brands that just email me way too much. Then as I have gotten through a lot of those low-hanging fruit emails, the promotional emails, the stuff that is so simple to delete because that sale happened during Black Friday and it's now May, I am getting into more of the emails where I will need to take action on them. I will have to make decisions, and I'm going to go back to the system that was outlined in Uptime because I still really like that, and I'm just more committed to following through with a process , for sustaining it. So the system described in that book is to sort your emails into five categories. I actually think I have to go back and look. It may have been only four in the book and I added a fifth one, but this is what I'm doing, so you can choose. And the categories are a read folder, a revisit folder, a respond folder, an add to list folder, and then lastly, archive. So maybe that's filing away 'cause it, there is no sort of action that's required. So again, that's read, revisit, respond, add to list, and archive. Three Rs and then two As. So when we think about maintaining this, sorting is one task. Okay, when you open up your inbox and move emails into their respective folders, you are coming in with the intention, with the task of sorting. I've gotten these 50 emails in the last couple of hours. Where do they go? Is this something I need to respond to? Is this something I wanna revisit and follow up on? Is this something I wanna read later? Where does it go? But taking action on those emails, so actually responding, actually following up on it, actually reading what's in it, that is a separate task and a separate headspace really, it's a different process and a different mindset. I compare it often to or think of it often as writing versus editing. It is a very different experience and a different headspace to come into a blank document and write versus opening up words that you've already written and edit. I worked with a, a writer years ago who was helping me with some copy, and she really challenged me to come into the document, if I was writing, only write. Don't edit as you go. Just write first, and then come back with this different hat on and be the editor. Now, the argument of the author of that book Uptime, Laura Mae Martin, is that when we try to do these two tasks at the same time, the sorting and actually taking action on our emails, that it slows us down, and really, we should be separating them. So you sit down or open up your inbox, you've already decided in advance, "Am I sorting or am I taking action?" She calls it processing, so maybe it's sorting or processing. Now, the problem that I experienced in terms of following through on this structure, and I see this with so many of my clients with different tasks throughout their day, the things that they're like, "I, I always run out of time," or, "I never have time for this. I really wanna do it, but it doesn't happen," is that we just kind of assume it will happen. I was coaching a client in session a couple of weeks ago, , talking about s- summarizing meetings and following up on the things that come out of a meeting, right? The action steps or the things you're gonna go do as a result of the conversation that you had in that meeting. She was like, "I know I need to do this. I know it will make my job easier, but I just can never get it done." Well, she wasn't actually allotting time for that work. She just assumed that it would get done, maybe as the meeting was wrapping up or that she would spend the next 10, 15 minutes after the meeting doing it, but it was never a commitment on her calendar, and so it didn't happen, or if it did happen, it was rare, and it was very inconsistent. I noticed that I did the same thing with email. I was really great at sorting into those folders, but then I just assumed that I would fit in processing my email to my days. It would just happen, right? Email is something we're always checking, we always do. When really, as I know now, and we all know here, it should be a task that I need to dedicate time to. I need to explicitly set aside time for myself to actually process my emails. Now, depending on your role and the volume of emails you get, that might look like multiple time blocks a day, where you're popping into the read folder or the revisit or respond folder, and you are processing through those things. Maybe you only read things in your read folder twice a week 'cause those tend to be more thought leadership articles and things that you don't have to take action on. But maybe you need to check your respond folder and process through that folder three times a day. That takes time, and you need to account for that. And then have that purpose or that intention when you get to that time on your calendar. So, my strategy as a business owner and, a coach is very different from what it would have been in my corporate days, where being responsive is a part of the job, and I get that. For me right now, though, my goal is to respond to emails in my respond folder for 30 minutes a day. That is batching, right? And that will be something that I put on my calendar, and yes, it may mean that I do a little bit less of my project work, of those important but not urgent tasks. But if I don't put that there, it won't happen. So once I get through the sorting and my inbox is back to a baseline, that's what I'll be doing. I'm gonna be experimenting and figuring out the cadence and the frequency of processing all of those email folders and what that looks like for me, both personally and professionally. And I'm gonna set aside time on my calendar each day to do that. No more hoping or just assuming that it will happen. I have to make it happen. I have to commit to making it happen. And I also am going to challenge myself to make faster decisions and be more ruthless. Now, maybe I will discover or implement some AI tools that can help me with maintenance at some point. I'm not there yet. If you have a recommendation, I am certainly all ears and open to considering what that could look like. Maybe that's what you are already doing. Whatever works. But I know that I had to fall off my process to know exactly what the problem was. I tell my clients this all of the time. It's actually a good thing to try and fail because that gives us so much more data to work with. Now we know where to troubleshoot and how to adjust things so that you can follow through and you can be successful It's all part of the process, and me ending up here with thousands of emails and a missed deadline just helped me see what wasn't working, and now I can go fix it. If you like having step-by-step processes like this one, you may like my guide to getting things done, which walks you through how to create an effective to-do list and then manage those tasks for both work and home. You can grab a copy of that guide at themothernurture.com/resources. And if you are feeling inspired or motivated to tackle your inbox, to do some sorting and get it to a manageable baseline, please let me know. I would love to hear from you and go through this challenge together. You can send me a DM on Instagram at lovemothernurture. All right. I will talk to you all next week, and until then, take care. Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.
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