Email Management: How to Deal with Email Overwhelm

You turn on your computer, and before your day has even begun, you are feeling overloaded and overwhelmed. You have 50 new messages, plus all the ones you have yet to get to from earlier in the week (and month, and year!). Email, as you know, can be a cause of great convenience and also great stress.

Email overwhelm can be caused by the quantity or the quality of your messages. Sometimes the sheer number of messages is stressful, whereas, other times, the content of the messages throws us off. Because of this, email overwhelm needs to be dealt with at two levels, the psychological and the practical.

Psychological Causes and Solutions to Email Overload

Dealing at the psychological level requires asking yourself what about email is overwhelming you, and if there is a similar pattern in other areas of your life as well (usually there is). For example, are you overwhelmed by the number of request made of you by email, and if so, are you overwhelmed by people asking you to do things in general?

Are you overwhelmed by the amount of time it takes to go through emails, and if so, do you feel pressed for time in general? More specifically, do you get annoyed by spam or messages that should not be sent to you? And if so, do you feel frustrated that people interrupt you or waste your time in other ways.

Once you know the psychological cause and result, you can use strategies to address both. For instance, in the first example, you can work on your assertiveness skills to say no to inappropriate requests made of you, and your delegation skills to free yourself up to do what you do best.

In the second example (of feeling pressed for time), you can look for ways to boost your energy, such as exercise and nutrition. If you feel that you’re often interrupted by others, you can look for ways to create boundaries around your time and attention, such as by having office hours (like professors have) when people can come to you with issues, rather than an open door policy.

Practical Causes and Solutions to Email Overload

The most common practical cause of email overload is not having a solid organization and filing system. You let your inbox fill up to 200 (or 2,000!) messages and of course you become overwhelmed when you have to deal with them.

Dealing at the practical level involves setting up a system of email management that does not require you to make decisions about what to do with each message. For example, you create a system in which you keep only urgent and important messages in your inbox, file all others in their respective folders and go through these folders twice a week.
I have a rule that I cannot have more than 30 messages in my inbox- everything else needs to be acted on, deleted, or filed. Be careful that you don’t get into the habit of filing messages away never to see them again unless they are messages that you’ll never need to take action on (but they have helpful information so you want to keep and file them.

What are three steps that you can do today to recognize the cause of your email overwhelm and start to solve it?

Here are more resources on reducing stress
 

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