Seven principles to simplify email

Half of the eight billion humans alive use email.¹

Some of us rely on it daily.

We browse our inboxes dozens of times a day, likely because items require time, don't have a clear resolution, or because we need to wait til we can take action.

I aim at inbox zero, which means I try to keep my email inbox empty.

Others adopt inbox infinity, a phrase coined by Taylor Lorenz in early 2019, "accepting the fact that there will be an endless, growing amount of email in your inbox every day, most of which you will never address or even see."²

Here are my principles to minimize the time spent looking at email.

• Batch email. Process messages over a single session.
• Act once. When possible, take action the first time you look at a message to prevent mulling over it for long periods.
• Extract what's actionable. Don't use email as a to-do list. Move actionable messages to an external system. I'm currently using Notion.
• Snooze what isn't actionable yet. Gmail's snooze feature lets me delay emails to a future date when they will become actionable.
• Archive or delete. Once done with an email, I either delete it or archive it with a Keep tag to store it for the long run.
• Remove email from your phone. I've tried this in the past, and it's the best way to detach yourself from email. But it's not something I'm doing at the moment.
• Schedule emails. You don't need to respond to every email or reply right away. I often schedule messages for the following workday when I reply outside of work hours or during the weekend. This way, I don't involve others in work matters during the weekend and delay potential work-related replies while I'm off work.

Defining principles that work for everyone—or even a single person at different moments in life—is hard. This practice seems to be working for me right now. But I'll continue to adjust it over time.

Do you have other tricks to simplify email? I'd love to know.