The Small Change That Can Save You From Spending Hours On Email Every Week

As an entrepreneur, I love email. It’s my favorite mode of communication. It allows me to collaborate with people across the country and the world. It serves as the hub of all my communication with vendors, partners, and business development opportunities. It’s simple, reliable, and most importantly effective. Each morning I can fire up my Gmail and neatly see which conversations require attention.

Despite what the productivity gurus of the day preach regarding batching email and inbox zero, there are days where I’ll keep my Gmail tab open for hours on end if not the entire day. I’ll also keep emails in my inbox for days if it’s regarding a matter that requires priority attention for the week.

Yet for all of email’s benefits, I readily acknowledge its dark side, which is the ability for email to completely distract and derail you from what you need to get done to move your business forward. If you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer, you may understand what I’m talking about.

The designers at big companies are smart. They know what will get your attention. And every time I get a new email, it’s bold, highlighted, and tagged. In other words, I feel it’s almost screaming at me “open me now I could be important!” no matter who the sender may be.

The issue with this is that I used to aggregate my email accounts into one Gmail account so that I’d see everything. Along with seeing the emails from my business partner, I’d also see marketing emails from internet marketers I follow and emails about the latest flash sale. And the problem with this is that 80% of the emails I received were distracting and pointless to the task at hand.

Yet, I wouldn't want to unsubscribe from these emails because I like receiving the newsletter updates from the tech blogs. I like seeing what new strategies SEO and internet marketers are implementing. I like seeing how big companies use email marketing. In receiving these emails I’m able to continually educate myself about online marketing.

To solve this problem I used to try and use discipline to cut myself off from using email during certain hours. But this wouldn't work as I’d find myself back in my inbox as I was expecting to hear from someone during the day. And once I was in my inbox I lacked the willpower to stay away from the other new emails sitting there.

Google took a crack at solving this problem when they rolled out tabs within Gmail. But I still found it too easy to click on a new tab. It was too hard for me to stay in my primary tab.

Then a friend of mine made a suggestion, just create a new email account dedicated to unimportant emails. So over the next couple weeks every time I received an email from a  marketer, an online store, or a SaaS product, I’d change my email address associated with the account to my new email address, which was simply my old address with a “2” added at the end. This new email account wouldn't go to my main Gmail account so I wouldn't see them during the day.

In doing this, I never feel compelled to look at the emails in this second account because they’re already designated as “other” emails that don’t require attention. I don’t feel bad if I go into that account and just delete everything without looking at them because I’ve already designated them as unimportant.

This system forces the out of sight out of mind principle onto unimportant emails. I no longer have to rely on my willpower to ignore unimportant emails. And while I still need to work on batching my time on email and improving my productivity related to email, at least I know that any email that comes into my primary account is something that has a good chance of moving the ball forward in my business.

This one change has saved me hours each week from email distraction and irrelevant content. It’s allowed me to stay focused for longer periods of time during the day so I can pay attention to the things that actually matter.

Use this trick as another tool in your arsenal to use email effectively.