How to handle emails in a more efficient way — Step by Step guide to increase email productivity

Productivate ME

10 min readMar 19, 2022

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How to improve email productivity?

First, let’s be honest here — I HATE(d) emails.

The main reason for that is that they wasted a lot of my time during work and then at home.

Researches say that only about 10% of emails are important and require either reading for knowledge or answering.

That basically means — and hold on tight — that 90% of the emails are junk.

which means that you are spending A LOT of time reading junk.

In a study that was done on how much time people work on emails — the average was 5 hours ! (90% of 5 hours is too much time being wasted).

The second reason was the feeling I kept having: “Do I have new mail ?”, “it’s been too long since I checked my email…”, “I am feeling stressed since I didn’t have time to check my emails in the past hour…”.

So really — how can we not hate this genius yet highly misused technology.

Since that made no sense to me I decided to hit the online bookshelf and find better ways (and less stressful) to handle my emails.

And quite shocking — there were many very good tips that actually surprised me — a 10 years+ heavy email user — So I decided to summarize it here for future reference.

Best methods for being productive with your emails and ways to manage time effectively with emails

Step 1: Understand that Lottery winners are not notified by email

The main and most important thing that I understood (it’s not easy but it will happen…) is that emails are not a super urgent critical form of communication.

It’s meant to serve as a communication method to be used in the background.

We have chat App and Instant message apps to communicate on more pressing matters, or god-forbid even using the phone when it’s critical.

So keep in mind that if you wait a bit with your email and do not answer it immediately, or even missed an email — you did not miss the announcement that you won the great prize in the lottery and if you missed this email they are moving to the next guy…

Emails waiting in the Inbox are fine.

Step 2: Understand that your work is not to read emails — set specific periods for batching them — Work Comes Before Emails!

You are not being paid, or worse — you are not living your life to read emails. The target is to be short and concise with the operation and move on to doing more productive things.

Limit the amount of time you read emails — you need to decide based on your workflow if it’s 2, 3, or more times a day — but have specific recurring windows for that in your schedule.

Preferably a Pomodoro slot.

Step 2.1: Zero Inbox — is it an effective way to handle emails?

The “Zero Inbox” means that you keep your inbox to zero in order to be efficient and make sure you replied to all emails.

But is it more efficient?

Basically — it’s very dependent on the person — I like that my inbox is clean and I know that I handled everything — and using the other tips and tricks in this article to keep my Inbox clean I don’t spend a lot of time on emails.

But I do know that some people will not stop working on emails until it is zeroed out — this can take more than the allocated time, especially if you don’t use the other tricks in this article — otherwise, they will have this nagging feeling in the back of their head.

So choose what makes you feel better — if you can live without a Zero Inbox, good, if you must have a Zero Inbox and apply all the tips below and your inbox is zeroed in no time and it keeps you calm — even better.

Step 3: Don’t wake up to them and don’t go to sleep with them

Do not read your emails first thing in the morning (morning being either when you wake up or when you first start to work) — morning is for productive work, so complete a task before going into your emails.

Same for nighttime — they are not a bedtime story, and the dreams that they might give you are stressed on tasks that you just saw in your email and need to work on them tomorrow.

Step 4: Send Fewer Emails — it’s more time-efficient

When you send out emails you get some back — with interest — sort of like a “Hydra” you chop its head and 2 more come back… Each mail that you send gets replied to at least once, a few more for questions and if there is a distribution list in the recipients — be ready for a storm of replies. So try to minimize the number of emails you send -

If you are meeting that person later — skip the mail,
If the thread is longer than 3 emails use the “3 emails rules” — after 3 mails call the person you are interacting with.

Step 5: Emails are the worst interruptions — turn notifications off

As we saw before, emails are not critical and time-sensitive — yet, that “DING!” sound and small pop up notification with the headline is one of the worst interrupters there are — it steals your attention and causes Attention Residue on the email, especially if you got a glimpse and half read the Sender or the Topic and think that it’s interesting.

So turn the notification off completely!

(more info on interruptions in this Post).

Step 6: Hit that “Unsubscribe” button

Unsubscribe from all of those email dist lists you are not getting value from.

You might think that it’s not costing you anything to delete them — but those seconds each time add up to significant losses when you have a few dist lists.

Step 7: Rules, Exceptions, and Folders

Every decent email application today has an option to create automatic rules and exceptions and some sort of foldering or labeling mechanism. That saves me a lot of time — mainly by directing the emails to different importance levels.

This is what I use and recommend:

Exceptions for specific people — I use automatic rules for mails which my name is explicitly in the “TO” list and come from specific people — these emails go to an Inbox folder with the names of these people and appear in the “favorites”, these are the first ones I look at and include for instance: My Manager, The Team Leads I manage or specific people I have an important interaction with.
My Name in the “TO” — for all the other mails where my name is in the “TO” list and not by the “exception people” I have a specific Inbox folder for “TO ME” (or keep it in the Inbox) which if my name was there in the TO explicitly usually means that I have to read or reply.
Make sure to educate people that if your name is not required in the TO they need to move it to “CC” or at all — a couple of “Please move me to CC” will make people understand that they need to think about it more and this reduces the mistakes greatly.
My name is not in “TO” explicitly but is sent to a specific dist list — this also has named Inbox folder for.
Finally — “NOT TO ME” Inbox folder for all the messages where I am not explicitly written in the TO and not sent to a specific dist list or come from specific people.
Every automated informational dist list email goes to a designated folder and is “Marked as Read” — for instance: Automated test results, Build system emails, and such. They are just there to look at when needed and I don’t want to waste minutes each day just marking them as read or moving them to another folder.

The main impact of this automation system is that I know how much attention I need to give to these emails and I don’t miss important ones when I zip through 100+ emails without paying too much attention in 1 min when they are in the “NOT TO ME” folder for example.

Step 8: Use “+” and “.” to generate multiple Inboxes in your Inbox and easy to use filters

This might not be available in your work mail — depending on the server that they are using — but it’s certainly there in Gmail — test it and see for yourself by sending yourself test emails.

The power of this method is that it allows you to create endless mailboxes and easily made filters to sort out dist lists you registered that keep sending mails from slightly different addresses — and see which one spread your mail to other locations.

The system is very simple:

Add “+” sign to your original email address. For instance, if your email is mymail@gmail.com and you want to register to somesite.com dist list you can register with the email of “myemail+somesite@gmail.com” and this will reach your email also but the “TO” will show the email you entered that can be easily filtered.
Another trick is to add “.” anywhere in your email to create new emails — the same example as above — “my.mail@gmail.com” would also reach you.
Make sure you test that your email service supports these by sending a mail to yourself with these tricks.

Step 9: GTD (Getting Things Done) and The 2-minute rule to become more effective

If an email takes you less than 2 minutes to answer — assuming it does require you to answer the email — do it and get it over with so it will not be another thing to do later.

And more importantly — Do it once, don’t leave loose ends — get it over with and out of your head.

If it’s more than 2 minutes -

If it’s a long task think about finding a designated slot in your schedule.

if it’s not a long task — move it to either a P1, P2, or P3 named Inbox folders. And handle all of these in the next time slot you have for emails or a designated slot for handling emails in the P1/P2/P3.

Step 10: Don’t reply immediately to “urgent” emails

First, email is not a form of urgent communication so it’s not that urgent.

Second, let it stew for a while, usually, the “urgent” emails get to resolve themselves without interruptions.

Step 11: Stop Organizing your emails

In the past, I agree that having folders and tags on each email was critical for finding it later.

But in today’s world where searching is basic and has very advanced capabilities, you don’t need to sort each email to a sub-folder in a sub-folder in the hopes that you will find it later when needed. — Be true to yourself if you are working like this now — you have hundreds of folders and when you actually need an email from it do you just search for it or do you start going through the folders list hoping that it’s in a reasonable place…

I am not saying to cancel folders altogether — I still use folders, but about a dozen of them, high level enough to keep the sorting process easier and faster.

Step 12: Archive — Don’t Delete

Instead of deleting emails try archiving them — each mail provider has a configuration of how much time it will save things in the archive.

Pick a time that makes sense to you and archive instead of deleting. This is for two reasons — one, you don’t know when you will need something later. Second, exactly linked to reason one, you will be too afraid to delete things and will move to a folder and keep mails which you might, someday, maybe need.

Step 13: Delegate what you don’t know

If you got an email that you are not the best person to reply to — don’t take it on yourself and start investigating the issue on your own to get the best reply.

Instead, add the best person to answer it.

Step 14: Don’t waste time replying to the same things all the time — Use Templates

If you see that you are replying the same things to emails all the time use a “Templates” feature — that allows you to add a ready-made response in 2 clicks and save you time.

Gmail also has the “Canned Responses” feature in the Lab that has many ready-made responses already.

Step 15: Reduce the need for replies and threads

If you want to cut back on the emails that you are going back and forth understand that you are one of the main contributors to them.

So start by Send Fewer Emails.

After that make sure that your emails are not calling for a response back:

Make sure they are concise and to the point and do not require any follow-up questions on one hand, but not too long that things will get lost and will be re-asked again.
If it’s more than 5 sentences — you are probably overwriting.
Write using statements — not open-ended questions. Instead of “Maybe we should meet at 10 am tomorrow ?” be assertive and state — “let’s meet tomorrow at 10 am”.
Ask clear straight and to the point Questions — if you want to ask something, ask it, don’t go around the bush calling for follow-up questions.
Cut the fluff out — it’s not a discussion, it’s a mail, keep it short and to the point.
End emails with clear instructions and not open-ended questions.

Step 16: Make your subject line understandable and searchable

This is in order to make sure that people will understand what you wanted from them and for you to be able to later search for it when you will need the info from there.

In Summary

Emails can be annoying, they can be overwhelming and they can certainly impact your productivity if they are not handled correctly, using the above tricks to better time manage emails, to get the benefit that they can bring.

So follow this step-by-step guide to maximize your productivity with them.

Now go get Productivated :-)