Stop Checking Your Email

Rules cleaned up the inbox. They didn’t clear the work.

I already use Premail’s rules to sort my incoming mail. That takes a lot of noise out of the way, but there’s still work left over. I open the inbox, scan what’s there, read enough of each message to decide whether it matters, and mentally assemble a list of things I need to do. A cleaner inbox makes that process easier. It doesn’t eliminate it.

How often should you actually check email?

Lately, I’ve been skipping that process and going straight to my Premail Briefings. I have three scheduled: morning, midday, and evening. Those are the checkpoints that work for me, not a schedule Premail imposes. You can set them whenever you like.

Three checkpoints, on my schedule. When I reach one of those checkpoints, I go to the tray icon and open my most recent briefing. There’s my summary of what’s important, along with a little to-do list of the actionable items. Rather than working through messages to figure out what needs my attention, I can start with what needs my attention. The original email is still there when I need the full context, but it doesn’t have to be my starting point.

There is research behind checking less often, even though I have not measured what the briefings do to my own productivity. In a two-week study, the week people were asked to check email no more than three times a day was the week they reported less stress. The cost of the interruption itself is documented too: attention stays partly on the task you just left.

Starting with the list instead of the inbox

That’s making me noticeably more productive. I’m spending less time scanning and more time doing the things the messages actually require. I don’t have a number to attach to it, but I can feel the difference between sitting down to “check email” and sitting down with a list of things to take care of. The second one has a much clearer ending.

I’m still getting myself into the habit of relying on the briefings. The impulse to open the inbox is familiar, and having a better option doesn’t immediately erase it. But the more I use the summarized list, the less useful the old routine feels.

Filtering is not the same as knowing what to do

What surprised me is how far this goes beyond filtering. Filtering helps decide where a message belongs. A briefing helps me understand what I need to do about it. I thought I was building a convenient summary, but in daily use, that distinction has turned out to be a much bigger deal.

What I want email to be

It’s also getting closer to what I actually want email to be: an inbound connector from the world to me. People and services can keep sending messages through it. I just don’t want sorting through those messages to be a recurring task of its own. I want the important stuff to show up in a form I can act on, on a schedule I choose.

For now, that means morning, midday, and evening. I open my briefing, see what needs doing, and get on with it. I built Premail to help me spend less time dealing with email, and this little summarized list is doing more of that work than I expected.