Email isn’t going anywhere, but our relationship with it needs serious reflection and reconsideration. How often do you find that your schedule for the day is dictated by the content of your inbox?

The problem with email

We spend so much time each day checking, responding to, and managing our inboxes that it can start to feel like that’s the bulk of our job. But email is not your work – it’s merely one input into the real work you need to be doing.

Far too often, we find that our daily schedule and priorities are entirely dictated by the contents of our inbox. The pings of new messages arriving pull us away from more meaningful, high-value tasks, leaving us feeling stressed, scattered, and unproductive by the end of the day.

Read: Email-free mornings.

Email is a communication channel, a way to transfer information back and forth. But it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of your workflow. Spending the majority of your time immersed in your inbox is not conducive to creating the kind of impactful, high-quality academic output that you’re striving for.

Managing email

Here are a five tips to help you stop letting email dictate your day:

1. Set clear boundaries around email. Designate specific times of day to check and respond to messages, rather than letting them interrupt you constantly. Aim for 2-3 email sessions per day.
2. Distinguish between urgent and non-urgent messages. Respond promptly to time-sensitive, high-priority emails, but allow yourself to batch and respond to lower-priority ones during your scheduled email times.
3. Unsubscribe ruthlessly from mailing lists, newsletters, and other email sources that aren’t absolutely essential. The less irrelevant noise in your inbox, the better.
4. Use email management tools and strategies to increase your efficiency, like creating canned responses, using keyboard shortcuts, and organising your inbox with folders and labels.
5. Schedule time for focused, distraction-free work on your most important academic tasks. Protect this time fiercely, and don’t let email encroach on it.

Spending time in your inbox is not conducive to creating high-value academic output. It’s time to reclaim email as the tool that it is, rather than letting it become the entirety of your work.