Why You Should Treat Your Email Like Another Social Media Channel
If you have a public email address , wading through unrelated PR messages in your inbox can be a full-time job in itself. There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with every message you receive, so stop berating yourself for being behind and embrace the chaos instead.
Marketing emails may be the worst offenders , but they’re not the only thing holding us back from the uncluttered inbox that we all supposedly crave. Anyone known enough for their unsolicited email but not wealthy enough to hire a publicist should find good material in the bottomless pit of web queries, misdirected Google searches, and a terrifying set of messages from the general public. This particular predicament is all too familiar to journalists, and BuzzFeed News reporter Anne Helen Petersen has a great coping strategy : Rather than treating your inbox as a high-priority project, treat it as a social media channel to be viewed at your convenience. take you time.
Think about it: you probably don’t interact with every Instagram or Facebook post you scroll, and you don’t reply to every DM on Twitter. Why does your mailbox have to be different?
The answer, of course, is capitalism. Today’s labor market demands 24/7 availability and thus punishes workers who dare to set personal and professional boundaries . You can turn off YouTube comments and make your Instagram and Facebook profiles private, but anyone with your email address has a direct line with you that they can use whenever they want. Strong pressure to come across as competent and approachable can get you to respond to every possible email, but it’s a trap – replies only breed new responses. If the sender sells something you don’t buy or makes unreasonable demands on their time, it’s better for everyone if you don’t reply at all. Mark as read, delete or block and move on; your time is better spent literally on something else.
Of course, there are some emails you need to answer, and how you label them is up to you. I divide my inbox quite aggressively – I love the Promotions and Social tabs, which I literally never look at – but my real trick is to dismiss about 80% of Gmail notifications right from the lock screen … For the rest, I either answer as succinctly as possible at once, or I mark with an asterisk and return to them later. Also, I treat my inbox as a searchable archive and do all my high-priority communications in Slack or text messages. It works for me, and my unread counter has long ceased to bother me:
Remember, we all have the same number of hours a day, but most of us work alone. Just like bending over and waking up at 4am , the Inbound Zero Marketing scam is immortalized rich and powerful to make the rest of us feel shitty about our productivity. Don’t let the mailbox tire you; it will still be there when you are ready.