5 Strategies for Minimizing Email Anxiety

An incredibly full email inbox (or six incredibly full email inboxes if you are anything like me) is stressful on a good day and now, with COVID-19, people are sending and receiving more emails than ever. 

Between employees, co-workers, and clients emailing you about work, and every corporation you’ve ever done business with sending updates on their current COVID-19 strategies, emails begin to stack up fast and feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed increase too. 

As an ambitious entrepreneur and as just a human being existing in the world, you already have plenty of things to feel anxious about, so your inbox shouldn’t be one of them. 

Here are five strategies you can use to clean out the clutter, keep up with your business, and eliminate email anxiety from your life:

Schedule Time to Check Your Email

It is incredibly easy to let e-mailing take over your entire day. We’ve all experienced that feeling of looking back at your day and feeling like all you did was email. So, schedule times to check your email like morning (9am), afternoon (1pm), and evening (5pm) and commit to only checking your email at the times you’ve set. 

Set a Timer and Make a To-Do List

Instead of working in your email endlessly, try setting a timer and commit to only working on your email for that set amount of time. Whether you opt to spend an hour, 30 minutes, or 15 on your email, having that auditory reminder that it is time to move on can help you stick to your schedule and get sh*t done.

Quit using your inbox as a todo list and take the extra 4 seconds to write it down. This way you can power through a number of emails all at once, then have a to do list that you can reference and work off of later. Work on checking things off the list during your work time and reply to the emails when it is email time again. 

Start With The Oldest Emails First

It is easy to get caught up in the emails that are sitting right at the top of your inbox, but this can mean that older emails get lost or go unaddressed for too long. To combat this, try starting at the bottom of your inbox and work your way up. This way, you can maintain a reasonable response time and avoid losing emails. 

Prepare Some Boilerplates!

Do you often find your inbox full of emails that are asking the exact same questions? Save yourself some time by preparing pre-written responses for the questions you get asked most often. Then, you can just copy, paste, and hit send, without wasting time retyping the same answers over and over again. 

 Remove Push Notifications (Yes All of Them!)

Removing push notifications from all your devices can sound pretty frightening, after all, what if you miss something important?! Realistically though the majority of your emails aren’t so important that they can’t wait for you. Having push notifications reinforces that feeling of always needing to respond and be “on the clock” 24 hours a day 7 days a week, so if you can work through your fear of turning them off, you’ll find it is easier to focus without the constant ping-ing and it is easier to stick to your email schedule. 

Still think removing all your push notifications sounds scary, or worse, impossible? Try doing it for a little at a time. I know that due to the pandemic, I have to be “on-call” via my email as a virtual writing center consultant for three hours at a time. So, I can’t really turn off my email when I’m supposed to be on-call, but I can turn all my notifications back off when my shift is over. 

Consider turning off all your push notifications for at least a portion of the day, so that you can relax and focus better even for just some of the day. Who knows, maybe you’ll love the feeling so much that you start turning notifications off for the entire day? 

Lastly and most importantly, be kind to yourself. It’s ok if you aren’t perfect at utilizing these strategies, no one is. Make an effort, do what works best for you, and don’t forget that despite what it feels like, not every email needs a reply right now. The people emailing you are just as busy as you are, they probably aren’t staring into their inbox, refreshing it over and over again, just waiting for your reply. Most people assume it will take you a little bit to reply so hold yourself to that same set of expectations and try to let go of the feeling that you need to respond to everything right this second.