Stop Wasting Time on Email and Start Getting More Done

The science behind why email is so time consuming, and 4 things you can do to beat it back.

It’s a well-known fact that email wastes a ton of our time. McKinsey found that 28% of your time at work is spent dealing with email. According to the Radicati Group, we send and receive 122 emails a day on average. That number shows no sign of decreasing. There are a bunch of reasons this may be the case:

Email is addictive – Our brains learn that when we open our inbox, we might get a new message (think Pavlov’s dogs). This is reinforced by the ping of a notification. We train our brains to react to that ping by checking our email, and we are then ‘rewarded’ by the new message. The reward is a flood of dopamine. Dopamine is the drug that makes you feel good for performing a behavior,  and makes you want to do it again.

Even though we all hate email, we check it more often than we should because of this reward cycle. Recent studies (1, 2) found that most of us think we check email once an hour, but actually we check email every five minutes! Other studies show that once you check email, it takes over a minute to return back to your original task (source). A minute per email – at 122 emails a day, that’s almost two hours of time wasted.

We also procrastinate with email. Organizing email – things like filing old messages or deleting spam – is seen as helpful, when actually it just wastes time. It does feel better and more like ‘work’ than checking Facebook though, so we use it to procrastinate.

Lastly, email stresses us out. A recent study found that “limiting the number of times people checked their email per day lessened tension during a particularly important activity and lowered overall day-to-day stress.” Participants who were allowed to check their email a lot during the study were more stressed than those who weren’t. Funnily enough, they didn’t perceive themselves as more productive. Lesson? You don’t need to check email that often, and it’s better for your health if you don’t.

So not only are we addicted to email, which distracts us from our other tasks and stops us getting back to more important stuff quickly, it also stresses us out and makes us feel bad!

Despite this, as working professionals, we need to use email to do our jobs. So how do we solve this problem?

1. Re-train your brain

The first step is to stop letting email rule your work day. Turn of email notifications on your phone and laptop, and avoid checking it just in case. Give yourself one or two scheduled times each day to check your mail (this is called batching). If someone needs you urgently, they can call or send a text. This way you’ll wean yourself off the never-ending dopamine reward cycle.

You can even take batching a step further by setting up an autoresponder that explains your email abstinence and gives answers to FAQs. This is something Tim Ferriss is a huge fan of – and he’s one of the most productive people on the planet. Check out his autoresponse here and other examples here.

2. Respect yourself and your recipients

Now that you’re no longer addicted to email, try to optimize how you use it in your allocated email time. Try to use some of the following email best practices to cut down on the time you have to spend on it:

– Keep your emails short and to the point: This way you spend less time writing your email, and your recipient spends less time reading it. Win-win!

– Only send email to relevant people: The fewer people you email, the fewer people will email you back. Only CC people who need to know but don’t need to respond, or to put your main recipient in contact with that person.

– Put a call to action in your subject line: For example, “Response needed: Venues for sales meeting”. This makes it clear what the email is about and what your recipient needs to do.

– Highlight key points: Make sure your emails are ‘scannable’. Use text emphasis to highlight important information like times, dates and locations. Just make sure you don’t over-use it.

3. Let your email do the work for you

One of my favorite email hacks it putting your email signature to work. Including all your relevant contact details is a no-brainer. But if you’re promoting anything – an event, a book you wrote, a new product – include a link to that too! Even if your email isn’t intended to actively promote whatever it is, your recipient might just be interested enough to click through.

If you use Outlook at work, you can create multiple pre-formatted signatures to save time writing repetitive emails. Have a similar response for each sales inquiry? Create a signature. Find yourself writing the same answer to similar support requests? Signature. Often need to give people your contact details or social media accounts? Make sure they’re in every signature!

4. Find other tools to do the job

A lot of email back-and-forth happens because email is just the wrong tool for the job. Here are a bunch of great tools that can work with your email, or let you ignore it completely:

– Need to add some email tasks to your to do list? Use an integrated app like Todoist, Mail Pilot or Google Tasks to manage them.

– Spending ages dealing with spam or newsletters? Get off mailing lists with apps like Unroll.me. Narrow down the number of emails you receive with Glider. Or use a tool like Spamdrain or SpamTitan to prevent spam even reaching your mailbox.

– Working on a project? Forget sending project updates by mail. Use a dedicated project management tool like Trello or LiquidPlanner. This way you can always see who’s working on what, how long it’ll take etc., without sending a single email.

– Use email to send documents to your team? It’s 2016! There are a million cloud storage tools like Google Drive, Dropbox and Box that let you do that hassle-free.

So that’s it! With these tips in mind, you should find yourself wasting way less time on email, and spending way more time doing the things that matter!