I Don’t Let Email Run My Life
By: Lindsey Danis
Tags: Freelancers, Remote Working, Freelancing, Productivity, Time Management

Here’s how you can get inbox control, too

Photo by Matthew Fournier on Unsplash

I used to check email constantly. You know, just in case someone needed something from me. After email, I’d go on Facebook to see my notifications, then before I knew it, my quick break ate half an hour of my workday.

Ditching midday social media checkins was easy for me (shout if you want to know how I did it and I’ll unpack in a future newsletter), but getting control of my email was way harder. I had to realize how much time it was taking me and how few- none, really -benefits I was getting from it. See, I’d open my inbox and click a few unread emails, but I wouldn’t want to pause my productivity and actually write anyone back….which just meant the stack of to-respond-to emails was adding up while I was also wasting time.

Enter Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. I read the book begrudgingly, expecting Ferriss to be a hack, but I found the book much more helpful than I was anticipating for the way Ferriss flips many of the ways we’ve been encouraged to work for the sake of productivity into patterns that can actually help us be productive. In this case, email.

Ferriss checks his email twice a day.

When he’s in the inbox, he’s focused on writing and answering emails. The rest of the time, he puts up an autoresponder that lets people know that he checks his email twice daily (11 am and 4 pm), will respond then, and to call him if urgent action is required. The “urgent” email-to-call conversion is usually less than 10%,” Ferriss writes.

While I don’t use an autoresponder, for the last 18 months I’ve been checking email only twice a day (three times, if I’m expecting a contract or something timely) and almost never on weekends.

By making myself selectively available, I haven’t lost any work or received complaints from editors impatient to reach me. I’ve experienced no negative consequences and creep toward inbox zero (sub 10, atm), and I actually get back to people right away rather than read-and-shelve emails on an ever expanding to-do list.

Email is the primary tool I use to reach out to potential clients, manage existing clients, market myself (hi!), and otherwise manage the writing life. Yet it doesn’t own me. Constantly checking in like it’s a baby bird that failed to fledge is a distraction from the work of writing.

By setting parameters for my email, I moved out of reactive mode, where I was waiting for people to come to me and, when they did, prioritized meeting their needs rather than my own. I created more time to focus on meaningful work by enforcing email boundaries that supported pockets of time for deep work.

Drawing boundaries around your most important work and everything else-the whirlwind, Seth Covey calls it in The 4 Disciplines of Execution -is how you preserve the sacred space to honor your priorities and commitments.

When you are constantly available, plugged in and always on, you are essentially letting people know to come to you with your needs and teaching them that you will put aside your most important, necessary work to tend to those needs in the same way that my dogs know when they paw at my leg, I will stop what I’m doing and take them for a walk so they don’t pee on the carpet.

So yes, it’s a small act, but the ramifications compound. In 2020, we’re seeing what happens when one gender is told repeatedly, in every aspect of their life, to take on more work without supportive systems and processes-without boundaries. 2.2 million women have left the workforce because it’s impossible to balance a career, childcare, homeschooling, and domestic life.

Our culture teaches women from a young age (hello dolls and play kitchens) their purpose is to serve, and by the time we’re having children or marrying, cishet women have internalized the message and do twice as much domestic labor as men. Stepping back from the unequal division of labor at home, or the always-on expectation at work, requires skillful boundary management.

Your inbox is a perfect place to practice boundary setting. Your email management routine doesn’t need to look like mine or Tim’s to move the needle toward centering your needs, rather than always meeting others’.

Here’s Tim’s autoresponder script, if you want to check it out.

Lindsey Danis is a Hudson Valley based writer and frequent traveler who loves telling stories about travel, personal growth, resilience, and LGBTQ communities. She’s on Twitter @lindseydanis and has a productivity and business systems newsletter for self-employed writers.