brad garland

In the past, I have tested the idea of only checking emails twice per day and did it with a fair bit of success.  I have lazily gotten away from that but I just spent a better part of two weeks on vacation and have purposely stayed away from my email and wondered how many emails were actually actionable when I got back. Here’s what I found out.

I have two main email accounts (Personal & Work) with the vast majority coming into my Work account.  I broke down my email analysis into three categories of priority:

• All - This includes newsletters, group emails, advertisements and other randomness that isn’t being sent to just me. Mass mailings.
• FYI - Either smaller group or just ‘for-your-information’ emails that did not require a response by me.
• Actionables - These were emails asking specifically for me to respond back to them on when I returned.

Here’s how the numbers came out:

After 14 days and 432 emails I only had 15 emails, from both accounts, that I needed to do anything.  A mere 3.5%.  Now, to me, this says a couple of things:

1. Stop wasting your money/time - What would you rather do?  Spend cumulative 4+ hours per day checking your inbox via your laptop/iPhone/iPad or twice per day at 15-30 minutes per session. 
2. The power of delegation - I’ve been working on delegating tasks to people that work with/for me. The ability to empower those around you to make decisions and not require me to respond is one of the best ways to ‘be a good boss’ for one and reduce the extra emails. This is a topic in itself.
3. Don’t be held captive - I’m going to go back to checking email twice a day with a goal to move to once a week in the future (thank you Tim Ferriss and 4-hour workweek which I read this break!). No brainer here, back to 2x per day for me!

Also, re: newsletters.  I had NO IDEA how many newsletters I had subscribed to.  Since doing this rudimentary analysis I have begun unsubscribing to all newsletters and I’m easily in the 40-50 range.  Its out of control and you don’t even realize how often a newsletter comes in, you quickly delete it and keep that pattern going for years even! NO MORE!

I hope this allows you all to think about your own inboxes and time spent checking them and begin making the adjustments to breaking the shackles of email.