If the first half-hour or more of your day is spent reading thru emails, you are suffering from a cluttered inbox.
The Crazy Cycle
“Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” goes the refrain from the classic song by Daft Punk.
Delete the spam. File your to-dos. Re-read email from yesterday that you never got to. No time? Save that for tomorrow and do it ALL OVER AGAIN.
Day after day you go thru this cycle. But the email. Keeps. Piling. UP.
“There Must Be a Better Way!”
If you’re like me, you’ve tried it all:
- Sorting emails by sender in folders.
- Unsubscribing from spam.
- Using multiple email addresses.
But none of these techniques solved the problem. They only softened the symptoms and prolonged the inevitable. Something has to change!
Email Is Your ENEMY.
You can’t defeat an enemy that you don’t recognize as your enemy, so it’s time to call this blood sucker out!
Email’s job is to interrupt you NOW to get your valuable attention and STEAL it from whatever else you were doing at the time. Chances are, what you were doing first is more important. “But too bad, I’m email! READ ME, darnit! I could be important!”
No.
It’s time to stand up for yourself—to respect yourself enough to say “enough is enough! I am in control of my own attention span.”
This is the beginning of e-freedom.
Call In The Killer Robots of Email DOOM
We’re coming for YOU, nagging email scum!
In Outlook, Gmail, and most other major email clients, you can easily set up rules to have your Killer Robots of Doom auto-forward your emails by sender or subject to: their respective folders, the trash bin, or forward to friend to automagically delegate without a moment’s distraction.
Unable to unsubscribe from spam? Auto-forward the sender to your junk folder. Take that, hacker phishing spam!
Bypass The Email Hoards By Changing The Battleground
Sure, spam and distraction reign supreme in your email inbox. That’s why my team transitioned to using Slack for all internal AND client communications.
No, I don’t own stock in Slack. I just like not getting harassed every 10 seconds by a reply-all.
Easily segregate your team and clients into different workspaces—and within those, separate channels for each of your projects. Even direct messaging and file sharing! With lots of great app extensions and compatibility with essentials like Google Drive and MailChimp, Slack is easily the biggest email-killing weapon in your war chest.
(Don’t forget to turn off email notifications and set quiet times on Slack! There’s no point in adding new distractions to the old.)
Email Terror Raining From The Cloud
So many of our business emails were file sharing and updates on file versions. That’s just ridiculous! Our teams now upload files to Google Drive with alerts on Slack that we can see at our convenience. Again, protecting our valuable attention.
Whether it’s messaging on Slack, file sharing on Google Drive, or project management on apps like Trello, there are many cloud apps that can destroy the need for 95% of the emails you receive on a daily basis.
That means you can afford to check your email for just a couple minutes a day for messages from luddites outside of your network that are still slaves to the email hive-mind!
Free Your Mind!
It takes about 23 minutes to focus completely on a task. Email can break that hard-won progress in just a moment.
Free your mind! Free your thoughts. Be free to create and to strategize.
Email is your enemy. Join the war on email today and find new freedom every day!