Before we even introduce tactics and tools to solve the Email Problem, it’s essential that you have an understanding of why this has become a problem for so many people in the first place. Start here, with our podcast episodes introducing the email problem, and then defining and deconstructing the email problem, to get a better idea of the behaviors we all demonstrate that cause us to spend so much time on email.

When we send more email, we get more email. We create more work for others and we create an unending cycle of back-and-forth responses that keep us from getting to Inbox Zero. Listen to this podcast episode on sending less email to get less email to better understand the problem we perpetuate, that ultimately results in email overload and overflowing inboxes.

Every notification, dinger, whistle, bell, or change of an icon draws us away from our important work and brings us back into the inbox, where we tend to stay for minutes or hours. Listen to this podcast episode on turning off notifications to get familiar with how interruptions can distract us and draw us back into a reactive state.

Sticking with the theme of minimizing distractions that draw us back into the “Vortex,” it’s important to minimize interruptions by unsubscribing from anything that’s unimportant. Listen to this podcast where we discuss ridding our inboxes of the unnecessary by unsubscribing from the unimportant, and using “delete” rules to automate the deletion of email messages that don’t matter.

So many of us set up folders that require hours of our time to sort emails into. We even establish rules to sort emails into those folders, creating multiple collecting points that all need to be checked. In this podcast episode, we’ll discuss a way to set up a general archive, spend almost no time sorting, and using some of that saved time to search for email more effectively in that general archive.