Conquering Email (Again)

Since last August, I've opened only 8% of emails received. How I'm going to fix that.

How do I get so many daily emails from politicians I’ve never even heard of? And companies? Do you have this problem?

After spending most of yesterday moving stuff into storage, I needed some mindless, effortless work. I decided to do something about the 9,723 unread emails in my inbox. Mixed in with these unread messages were about 770 read email. Most of the read emails had not been acted on.

I looked at my email trash, too: 42k emails. My spam folder held another 12,000 I had a total of about 65,000 emails since August when I last went on a purge. For those keeping score, that equates to:

• 130,000 emails a year

• 1,100 emails per month

• 371 emails per day

In other words, if you emailed me and I didn’t respond, chances are:

a. I didn’t see it.

b. I saw it, but I saw something that looked more urgent before I could act.

Nearly 400 emails a day, you’ll admit, is more than one person can handle. And this counts only my personal email. I get another 50 emails a day at work—which I have to read and respond to.

I am not alone.