Post-vacation email overwhelm is never fun.
It’s a downer to see “Unread (664)” staring back at you.
It’s not for lack of trying to keep up
We went on a cruise this past summer. Not knowing how to cruise or what cruise internet connections were like, I paid for an extra device on wifi during the trip.
It didn’t work at all. Wouldn’t connect once.
I ended up having a better time having gotten away from my normal laptop routine, but it did nothing to decrease my email load coming back.
664 messages in Thunderbird
The day after returning, I fired up my desktop and braced myself:
664 unread messages.
This was a week and a half’s worth of messages in Mozilla Thunderbird.
How I got it down to 12 emails in 45 minutes
Forty-five minutes later, I was down to 12 emails that actually had real stuff for me to do.
And I didn’t even have to go nuclear on my inbox!
Here’s how I did it.
1. Filter everything into one folder
I have several email addresses that I monitor.
Thunderbird, like most decent email clients, lets you manage several email accounts all at once. Thunderbird also has automation rules called “filters” that act on messages automatically.
I have a filter that takes all incoming emails from all of my addresses and throws them into a single catch-all folder that I name … Catch-All.
So already I was looking at all of my unread messages in a single folder. That saves time.
2. Filter everything to apply intent tags
I have several filters that apply zero-to-many tags to every message. (“Zero-to-many” is database-speak for “zero, one, or more;” a message can have one tag, three tags, 10 tags, or none at all.)
Here’s the set of tags I have right now:
- Church (for church-related emails since I’m active there)
- Affiliate (for affiliate programs I’m signed up with)
- Financial (for money stuff)
- Contact (for emails from contact forms on my websites)
- Important (self-explanatory)
- Notification (for routine emails from various services)
- EasyMoney (for “get-paid-to” sites like surveys, paid-to-read email, etc.)
- Swim (for swimming-related emails for my daughter)
- Newsletter (for newsletters I’ve signed up with)
- Poker (for poker-related emails because poker)
- Poss Spam (a poor attempt to catch spam that isn’t otherwise caught)
I’ve built up the criteria over time for each of these filters. Most of them look at the “From” field for a particular sender and tag the email from that. Sometimes I’ll look at the “Subject” field for information and tag from there.
About two-thirds of my emails get at least one tag after running all of these filters. Most have just one tag, but a few have more than one.
3. Sort the emails by tag
This is probably the most important step.
Sorting the emails by tag groups emails with similar intent together. This lets me get in a focused mindset for several dozen emails at a time. If I were to process the emails chronologically, from earliest to latest, I’d be taking a lot more time per email because I’d have to reset my mindset with each new message. I might get a church email, then a spam email, then a couple of financial emails. It takes time and energy to switch contexts like that.
Having a week and a half worth of Newsletter emails all together makes them much easier to deal with. I know they’re all newsletters, and I can quickly sift through the ones I care to read.
Same thing for the Notifications. These got processed quickly, kind of like daily stock price alerts.
I got through the tagged emails — 433 of the 664 emails — in about 15 minutes. And I didn’t feel like I missed anything. That’s dealing with about one email every 2 seconds without rushing really!
4. Develop tagging rules for untagged emails as I process them
This is the part where I make things easier for next time.
I had 231 messages left without tags, which is more than I normally have.
So I took about a half-hour to categorize them and add criteria to the tag filters to catch them next time. I don’t do this kind of thing regularly enough, so it was a moment of opportunity to do so when I had a bunch of emails without tags.
(Another thing I don’t do regularly enough is unsubscribe from emails that no longer bring value to my life. But that’s a separate matter for a separate time!)
5. Schedule the remaining actions
What remains of my starting 664 messages now fits on one screen. That’s something I can handle!
Automation got me most of the way there
A lot of the efficiency I experienced with this batch of emails was the result of the system I had already set up — particularly the automatic application of tags to emails based on my criteria.
Automation is something you pay for once and it delivers value again, and again. My automation rules make it super-easy and super-fast to put my emails into piles that make sense.
Your piles probably won’t be the same as mine, but you can take a holistic look at your inbox to find patterns that you can exploit. You don’t have to treat each email message as its own thing, especially if you know what it’s about just from the subject line. Make a filter or a rule that catches one kind of message from some predictable pattern, and you’re on your way.
What can you automate today?
(Header Photo by cottonbro studio)