How to Reclaim Your Email Inbox: From Overwhelm to Inbox Zero

[00:00:34] Hey guys, welcome to The Digital Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Marisha Pink, aka The Digital Diet Coach, and autumn is well and truly upon us. I don’t know about you, and obviously it depends on where you are in the world, but the weather is getting colder. It’s starting to get darker earlier and it’s not that bad yet.

[00:00:55] To be honest, I actually really love this time of year. It makes me feel kind of warm and fuzzy and snuggly. It’s a really nice period before it gets super cold, at least here in London. What I don’t love is my email inbox.

[00:01:10] And don’t get me wrong, email is super convenient. But like all great technology ideas, email is one of those things that is completely amazing as an invention until it takes on a life of its own, and it creates all these unexpected challenges and experiences that we couldn’t have ever anticipated when the invention first came out.

[00:01:30] Now, email has been around for a pretty long time. In fact, I’m sure some of my listeners don’t even remember a time without email. And many people don’t know this, but the person credited with the invention of email is a computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson, who created a program called Send Message that would send text instead of files over ARPANET, which was the Department of Defense’s computer network. And Tomlinson is responsible for introducing the @ sign, which we have in our email addresses, which separate out the user’s name from the name of the machine.

[00:02:06] And in 1971, he sent the first ever email or what’s credited as being the first ever email, and the message just said QWERTY UIOP. And he sent it from one Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 10 computer, which is a Department of Defense computer, to another one that was in the same room. So he wasn’t even sending it that far.

[00:02:24] And obviously that was the beginnings of what we now know as email today. And email in its current form didn’t become popular on a consumer level until the rise of web-based email in 1993, which let you log into your email anytime, anywhere. But it wasn’t until the late 90s that things really took off with the invention of Hotmail, because Hotmail was the first popular and free webmail platform.

[00:02:50] And I was thinking about this, because I think I was a fairly early adopter of email and one of my first email addresses – I’m actually cringing as I am preparing to say this – but my first email address wasn’t even a Hotmail address. You used to be able to get custom domain names without actually having to buy the domain name. So the bit that comes after the @.

[00:03:12] And my first email address was babyface@bacardiandcoke. And I’m cringing as I say that, but it was the 90s. I was young. I didn’t know any better. I thought that Babyface was a super cute name. I thought it was cool to have an email address that was at Bacardi and Coke, even though I wasn’t old enough to drink and wasn’t drinking.

[00:03:34] But it really made me think about how much email has transformed our lives. Just before that time, I had two really great friends that I met on a holiday to Jamaica when I was 13. And we used to write letters to each other. One was living in Jamaica and the other one was living in Florida. And we used to write these letters that would literally arrive in the snail mail in the post.

[00:03:56] And that was super exciting, obviously, at the time. And my grandma has lived abroad for most of my life as well. And I used to write letters to her. And all of those handwritten letters, because I think at some point I did graduate to writing them on a computer, but a lot of the original ones were handwritten. All of those eventually became emails.

[00:04:15] Those were the first people that I started to correspond with over email. I also remember in the early days sending really pointless emails. So there was a guy that I had a crush on and I remember trading emails with him using all the fonts and all the colours possible, and trying to find creative ways for us to sign off our names and sign off our emails each time we messaged each other.

[00:04:36] And it really made me think that, gosh, when email first came on the scene, receiving an email was really exciting, especially as a kid or as a teenager. It was the equivalent of getting posts through the mail because, you know, there’s no adulting going on, there’s no bills. As an adult, there’s definitely a period where you think nothing good ever comes through the post except bills and things in brown envelopes, like parking tickets.

[00:05:00] So, it was really exciting to receive email. It was a good thing and you would go and you would check your inbox, and be really excited to receive a message from somebody that you knew. And we are so far away from that time now that it’s almost laughable to think that that was the emotion that was attached to it, because things are so different now.

[00:05:18] These days, for myself and for so many people, email is just synonymous with stress. Email is stressful. It’s become another thing that you need to check and you need to monitor. It’s become another thing that you need to proactively manage before it becomes overwhelming. And we never actually reach inbox zero, which is having no emails in your inbox to deal with, simply because of the volume and the frequency that we receive emails at.

[00:05:45] And I know for a lot of people that the build up of email in your inbox can feel really uncomfortable. And so you then end up dedicating literal hours to clearing out your inbox or trying to get on top of your emails, and ultimately failing to do so because of that volume and the frequency with which you’re receiving emails these days.

[00:06:05] And the best example of this is when you go away on a holiday, especially when you’re taking a break from work. Work email is typically the first mountain that you have to tackle when you get back,. So much so, that it’s kind of a thing where you get back from your holiday and it’s like, how many emails did you have waiting for you when you got back after your one week break?

[00:06:23] People actually end up spending the evening before they go back to work just reading through emails and tackling emails because it’s become this big task, this big thing that we need to do. And invariably, half of those emails are irrelevant to you. They’re either about things that have passed and have been and gone. They’re about things that don’t concern you. They’re about people leaving their food in the fridge over the weekend and it going mouldy, whatever it might be.

[00:06:48] But you know, most of the things that we end up dedicating that time to clear out our inboxes for doesn’t enrich our lives in any way. It doesn’t pertain to the work that we do. And so it’s just become this overwhelming, stressful exercise to manage and maintain your inbox.

[00:07:06] And when I was thinking about why this happens, I think it’s partly because of the way that we use email as people. It’s partly because of the way that companies now use email to access us as consumers. And then, of course, it’s partly because of the way that corporations have designed email apps and devices that shapes how we use them and actually encourages us to do so.

[00:07:28] And when I try to break this down, it’s actually about eight different things that I could pinpoint as to why we find ourselves in this situation. And on their own, they may have been smaller, more manageable things. But when you add them all together, you kind of understand why we have this perfect storm in email that makes us all feel so stressed and overwhelmed.

[00:07:47] The first thing is that we have multiple email addresses and multiple email accounts. For most people, you’ll have at least two, so you’ll have a work email address and a personal email address. But lots of people, myself included, also have legacy accounts that you can’t delete. So, I don’t have babyface@bacardiandcoke anymore, I’m pleased to say. They stopped offering those custom domains for free. But I do still have old Hotmail accounts because I was a Hotmail user before I became a Gmail user.

[00:08:16] And like so many people, the reason that I don’t delete them or feel like I can’t delete them is that those email addresses are connected to old usernames and logins for different services and platforms that I’ve used over the years. And you can obviously now change usernames and email addresses associated with your accounts quite easily. But on some of the older platforms that I used to use, once you picked a username and an email address, you weren’t able to change it. So I’m stuck with these kind of logins.

[00:08:46] Another reason why you might have more than one email address or account is because lots of people like to create fake email addresses for signing up to things, because they don’t want to use their main email address for exactly the same reason that I’ve just mentioned. You’re going to end up with even more email traffic in your main inbox, in your main email address, and loads of people just don’t want that.

[00:09:06] Some people create email addresses for special events, for one off occasions, like a wedding. So maybe there’s jennyandjamesgethitched@gmail.com and you use it when you’re planning the wedding, and talking to vendors and suppliers, and managing RSVPs from your guests. But then after that point you never use it again and never bother to actually shut it down.

[00:09:27] And if you happen to be self-employed and run a small business, or run multiple businesses like I do, it’s actually not uncommon to end up with even more email addresses than this. So I have six at the moment. I think it is at the last count. At times, I’ve been up closer to eight, nine, and 10, just so that I can have an email address with my name in it, at the right domain, associated with the right company or the right business.

[00:09:51] But also, when you’re running things on your own, and you want to separate things out so it’s a bit easier for you to manage, you end up having generic emails for different uses. So you might have hello@ whatever the domain name is to just manage general inquiries. You have your actual name at the company domain for when you’re dealing with current and existing clients. You might have privacy@ the domain name to manage data privacy and information requests because that’s a legal requirement.

[00:10:20] So it’s really easy to see how you could end up with six, seven, eight, nine, 10 email addresses, and multiple email accounts across different email providers, especially if you have been using email for any kind of length of time. And originally, before the invention of the smartphone or phones that were capable of loading email, you would only access these via the desktop, either via a desktop app or via a webmail client that you could open in your browser. But of course now, mobile email means that you are never inaccessible.

[00:10:50] There is always this expectation of a response. And so, as a medium, I think email started to become used much more. People might send you an email instead of calling you or texting you because it means that they can get your attention and share whatever it is they need to share with you, or ask whatever they need to ask of you, without actually having to interrupt you, even if that means it’s out of hours.

[00:11:12] And with the global world that we’re living in, especially if you do business internationally, this essentially means that email is anywhere, anytime, 24/7, worldwide. I often work with clients that are in the US. I have friends and family in Asia, which is obviously also on a completely different time zone. And what that means is there’s no down tools moment. It means that, even if your inbox was clear when you shut the computer for the day or closed your iPhone, you end up invariably waking up to email because people on other time zones have continued to share email with you.

[00:11:43] And I saw this post the other day, it was actually about social media, but I think it applies here. And the question that was posed was basically, well, what if it was closed, like a shop? So, if you don’t get to the shops in time, let’s say you don’t get to the supermarket by 8pm, that’s it. You don’t get to go into the supermarket. They don’t open it up especially for you. Nothing can happen once the supermarket is shut and you have to wait until the following morning when the supermarket reopens.

[00:12:11] And this got me thinking, well, what if email was closed? What if after six o’clock or seven o’clock, whenever you finish work, email just stopped? Nobody could send you messages until you open shop again the following morning. And I think this is a brilliant idea and it’s one that we’re going to explore a little bit later in this episode. So stick around, because I went to do some digging for you all to see how we could actually make this possible, because I think it’s a fabulous idea.

[00:12:35] The other reason that I think our inbox has become so clogged, apart from the volume and the frequency of email and the accessibility of it all, is this idea of never-ending storage. We all read email and we take action. So we reply or we forward the email, or we click on the link and go and fill out whatever form we’re being asked to fill out.

[00:12:54] But so often, many people don’t delete the email once they’re done with it, or they don’t file it away if they need to refer to it again. So it just sits in the inbox, and obviously that builds up and builds up over time. If you’re weirdly nostalgic like I am, or a bit sentimental, or if you’re just a hoarder, you may even keep old emails.

[00:13:12] And whatever the reason, so many of us are also keeping old emails that we do want, but we’re also keeping emails that we don’t want and that we’ll never look at again, out of some notion that one day we might have to refer back to it. When the truth is that that email from 2011, you’re probably never going to look at it again, never mind look for it.

[00:13:31] And on some email clients, you never seem to run out of storage. So, as I said, I have these Hotmail accounts and they never seem to run out of storage. They just keep going and they’ve been going for donkeys years. But on others, like on my Gmail, which is the one I actively use, I get prompted to buy more storage.

[00:13:47] And I haven’t done it yet. I’ve been getting notifications from Google Workspace for months and this happens to me periodically. And instead of finding a more long-term solution for the problem, I just end up deleting a couple of emails and having a bit of a blitz. Whatever I need to do that’s the bare minimum to allow me to continue functioning and using my email. But obviously the problem still exists.

[00:14:09] And for other people, they may end up approaching that limit and they don’t do the clear out. They just follow the prompt to buy more storage, increasing the capacity. Which obviously is great for Google, because it means then people are paying for more storage beyond what you get for free as part of the default plans. But again, it’s not really solving the problem.

[00:14:27] We have this thing where we’re creating more and more data, and creating more and more files, and having to find somewhere to hold them all, instead of dealing with the root cause of the problem and thinking, well, do we actually need to keep any of this stuff? Because most of the time the answer will be no.

[00:14:41] The other problem is that we all love to sign up for freebies and discounts and prizes and for stuff that we’re never actually going to read. And this works because of the basics of email marketing, where the principle is I will give you something of value, or something that you perceive to be of value, if you will give me your email address. And then after I’ve given you it, I will keep on emailing you.

[00:15:03] And that’s how we end up on the mailing list for so many different things, even if we were only going to make a one time purchase. And it has improved when the GDPR regulations came into force and were updated, because it has forced companies legally to be more transparent about what they will be sending you.

[00:15:20] So if you go to fill out a form for, let’s say, a 20% discount at a furniture store, they do actually have to write somewhere on the form, or they’re supposed to, that by providing your email address, not only will you get that 20% discount, but you will also be signing up to receive offers and discounts and updates of new products or whatever it might be from them as well.

[00:15:42] They are supposed to give you the option to opt out of receiving that additional content, but to be honest, many companies don’t give you that option. And also many companies just don’t even adhere to it. Even if they haven’t told you that you’re going to be sent all these other emails about other things, they will persist in emailing you after they’ve shared your discount code.

[00:16:01] And you can report these companies for breaching the GDPR regulations. I’ll put a link to the Data Privacy Commission’s website, in case you do want to take it upon yourself to file a complaint. But to be honest, who really has time for that, especially when you probably would be complaining about 50 different people every single week.

[00:16:18] And so what happens is, we all keep signing up for 15% off, for early access to ticket sales, to enter a prize draw to win a free air fryer. And we keep receiving emails about more special offers, more tickets, more prize draws, sales, and new season products. And I will say, being on the other side of the fence as a marketer and also someone running a small business, that many consumers have cottoned on and will sign up for the discount and then immediately unsubscribe as soon as they’ve got their special code or their special link. But most people won’t. And they will then just proceed to ignore all of the other emails that come from those companies and not delete them, which leads to that same problem of clogging up the inbox.

[00:16:59] The other challenge with this is that everyone is desperate for your attention. And in the case of companies in this context, they’re desperate for your money as well. So I think over time, companies have increased the frequency with which they send these types of emails. It used to be maybe they would send you something once a month or only when a sale was on, or maybe once a week at best, but there are definitely some companies that are now sending emails multiple times a day and they are sending them because they are multiple types of email.

[00:17:29] So what I mean there is maybe you do get the weekly roundup, but you’ve also said that you want to get any special offers and you also want to get anything that’s located in your city. And so suddenly you’re on three types of mailing, which can lead to getting multiple emails in one day. And that also makes unsubscribing trickier because you don’t actually know which type of email it is that you’ve received.

[00:17:53] They don’t label it on the emails themselves a lot of the time, but then when you click unsubscribe and you go to the unsubscribe page, they start asking you to pick which of the seven different types of email you want to unsubscribe from. And you either get overwhelmed by that and then don’t unsubscribe from anything because you’re not sure which one it is you’re supposed to pick, or you unsubscribe from all of them and end up losing the information that you did want to keep in the process.

[00:18:17] And then for the things that you do sign up to that you do want to receive regular communications for. So if you sign up for daily or weekly roundup of news or alerts or deals. So many of us are so busy, we’re so time poor, that we don’t actually have time to read these things. And so again, the volume just builds up, and builds up, and builds up, depending on the frequency, but also depending on when we can make time to read them. And these emails all sit in our inboxes.

[00:18:45] For myself, I know, I have signed up to Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert email, which I think comes out once a week. I couldn’t even tell you at this point, which is kind of indicative of the problem, I think. I’ve signed up for a handful of newsletters about developments in AI, because it’s evolving really rapidly, and I thought that would be a good way to try and keep up with what’s going on.

[00:19:05] I’m signed up to Jack’s Flight Club, which gives you flight deals when there are error fares or sales on, or just really good fares for long haul flights and short haul flights. I was signed up to Time Out which tells me about different things that are happening in the city because I wanted to be able to get out more and make the most of living in a big city like London.

[00:19:24] I get pharma industry news. I’m signed up for Google alerts. I can tell you that I don’t actually have time to read most of these things most weeks. And yet, I’m loathe to unsubscribe from them, just in case there’s something in there one time, that I want to look at. And I don’t delete the emails from previous days or previous weeks, because I also have this weird delusion that I’m coming back to them. And I know that I’m probably not alone in this.

[00:19:50] The other thing clogging up our email inboxes is what I like to call the duplicates. And these are email notifications for different platforms and services that you use, which are in fact duplicates of in app notifications and are turned on by default. So some examples of this might be, I recently had LinkedIn Premium trial for a month. And I was getting all of these notifications in the LinkedIn app itself but I was also getting emails about them, which was driving me mad because there was very many every single day.

[00:20:20] I’ve spoken before on the podcast about how Instagram does this and you should definitely turn off a lot of Instagram’s notifications, if not the email notification at a bare minimum, because I don’t need to know by email every single time someone is following me, or liked to comment, or something like that.

[00:20:35] And I use an app called Treatwell, I don’t know if it’s outside of the UK, but it’s basically an app for booking beauty treatments and salon appointments and things like that. So I use it to get my mani-pedis booked. The app will confirm your booking. The app will send you a reminder when your booking is coming up. You don’t need an email as well to tell you that your appointment is booked or to remind you that your email is coming up. And yet muggins here has got that turned on as well. And when I realised this, that was one of the first things that I turned off because you simply do not need the same information in two different places. It’s just clogging up your inbox.

[00:21:10] So all of that is stuff that technically we did sign up for, but what about the stuff that we didn’t sign up for? If you’re unlucky enough, you may have been the subject of a data privacy breach. In those breaches often big companies’ databases are hacked and customer emails are leaked, and then they’re sold, or they’re used by people for nefarious purposes. And it’s one of the most irritating things ever. Because if you start out with a new email address that only actual people and actual services that you use have, and then suddenly you are the subject of a data privacy breach, you all of a sudden start getting all these wild and crazy emails.

[00:21:46] Some of them will be picked up by the spam filters, but a lot of them won’t be because they are coming from legitimate people or legitimate businesses that have bought an email list, which your email address happens to be on. And that’s obviously an area where companies need to do better and take a look at their cybersecurity practices. But you also have a lot of companies that will willfully sell the email addresses of their customers without your permission. They are supposed to have your permission before they do anything with your data, but they don’t. They sell the customer lists on and then you start getting emails from people that you never asked to receive them from.

[00:22:19] I’ve definitely had a few of those and they are basically people pitching me different services, mostly in a business context. And then at the bottom of the email, I’ll see an unsubscribe link. And it’s like, you know, if you don’t want to hear from me, then you can just unsubscribe, I won’t bother you again. But I never asked to be subscribed to your email list or to your prospecting sales pipeline in the first place.

[00:22:38] The other thing that I’ve noticed, in maybe the last year or so, is that I get emails when I have started shopping online and then abandoned the cart. So, they’re known as abandoned cart emails. But the thing that I find weird about that is that I have obviously gotten to a stage in the checkout process where I’ve got things in my cart and I’ve given you my email address to start to be able to give you my shipping information or whatever it might be and then I’ve decided not to do it. In my mind, because I haven’t actually made the purchase or I haven’t actually pressed submit, I don’t think that you should be emailing me.

[00:23:12] I know a lot of companies might consider that to be a transactional email because it relates to a potential transaction, but the transaction hasn’t taken place. So in my mind, abandoned cart emails, where I don’t already use a service and I haven’t already bought something from a company and I have an account, also is stuff that I didn’t sign up for. If I didn’t end up buying it, yeah, maybe there’s a small chance that I forgot. But maybe I just decided that didn’t want it and I changed my mind. And it’s annoying to be emailed about it and then to have to unsubscribe, in order to stop those emails from coming into my inbox.

[00:23:43] And then of course, if you’re unlucky enough that your spam filters don’t pick this up, there are the emails from that one random Nigerian uncle that you didn’t know you had who wants to give you $3M and just needs you to send your bank details, and the pills promising to help you enlarge the penis that you don’t actually have. So all of this just adds to the great big soup that is your email inbox.

[00:24:06] And when you layer on the next type of email, which I like to call Sloppy Senders emails, things just get even worse. Email has become a little bit like instant messaging for some people, and so there are a lot of one line emails, which is kind of not what email is meant to be for. There are all the emails when someone pressed send too quickly and forgot to add the attachment, so you end up getting two messages instead of one when they realise what they’ve done.

[00:24:30] There are the people that like to CC the entire world in their emails, and I love her very much, but my grandma is one of these people. She likes to send emails to her friends about when she’s visiting. As I said, she doesn’t live in the country. And somehow I get CC’d into all of these emails, and then I’m also still in CC as they’re all replying and trying to arrange to make their plans, which I have no part of.

[00:24:53] And whilst being cc’d into emails that actually have nothing to do with you is kind of frustrating, there’s nothing more annoying than that person at work who does the accidental reply all. Literally had one last week at work, where someone said, “Hey, I’m no longer working on this piece of business. Please can you remove me from this?” All like 70 people that were on this email didn’t need to know; that you could have just emailed the sender.

[00:25:16] And the last kind of Sloppy Sender, the last kind of email generator, if you like, is that invariable thank you loop. So you send an email to someone, say a bunch of stuff, they respond and they say thank you. And then you respond and you say thank you to them for saying thank you. And then they respond and say thank you for your thank you that was thanking them.

[00:25:34] You know what I mean, you get into this weird little loop thing where everyone is so over polite because no-one really knows when email chains are supposed to end, when it’s acceptable to stop responding. And I think we’re getting a bit better at that now, but certainly that’s responsible for generating a lot of unnecessary email traffic.

[00:25:50] And so when you take all of that together, it’s easy to see how that could be overwhelming, and how it could be frustrating and become stressful trying to manage that volume and frequency of email traffic. But then devices and technology companies don’t make that any easier for us. When you think about your smartphone or your computer and you think about having email apps on your phones, nothing is more stressful than seeing notifications pop up and seeing that little red notification badge with the numbers going up and up and up and up.

[00:26:21] And I’ve spoken about this on the podcast before; I’ll link the episode in the show notes where I talked about persuasive design. But essentially apps like email have been designed like this because that red colour and the increasing number in the badge speaks to our alerting attention that we have as humans. And we associate the red colour with danger and an immediate threat that we need to respond to immediately.

[00:26:46] And so when you see those badges going up and up and up as you get more and more email throughout the day, it’s really difficult to ignore it. Intuitively, you feel like you need to give it your attention in case there is a potential risk or threat, which nine times out of ten, you will not find in your email. But that entire experience of watching the numbers go up can be really, really stressful, as much as actually opening up your email and seeing how many messages you have to read and respond to.

[00:27:12] And if you have the type of notifications where you have a preview of the message that you’ve been sent, it actually means you may end up reading emails twice. Because you kind of see a preview, think that you need to open the whole message, read the whole message once to assess the urgency of it and whether you need to respond. And then probably end up reading it again if it wasn’t urgent, in order to fully digest it and respond with whatever action is required.

[00:27:35] And so all of this means that it’s a really stressful experience. And it means that you don’t often end up seeing the email that you actually want to see. You don’t end up seeing the email from friends, from family, sharing good news, sharing photos. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, but I know for me, personal email definitely is almost redundant at this point.

[00:27:56] And so as I was thinking about this, I thought, oh my gosh, I really, really want to claim that back. I don’t like that email has become something stressful in my life. I don’t like that I’m not able to use it for connecting with people in the way that I want to. So if you’re anything like me and you want to claim it back, here is the plan that I’m going to follow and I’m going to share it with you now.

[00:28:17] And before I do, I’m not going to ask you to sign up to anything on email, but if you are enjoying the podcast, please make sure you subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening on and make sure you give us a rating or a review. It would mean so much to me. You have no idea how much it helps other people to discover the podcast and hopefully benefit from all of the tips and tricks and hints that I’m sharing to help women have a better tech-life balance.

[00:28:44] And of course, if you subscribe to the podcast, then you will never miss an episode. You will get notified each and every Tuesday when the episode drops, and you’ll be first to hear what tips I’ve got in store for you each week.

[00:28:55] So, coming back to email. I think we have to deal with this in two parts. At least that’s what I’ve decided to do and I think it makes sense. The first part is gaining control over your email and getting everything in order, and the second part is keeping it that way, because I think they’re two separate exercises. It’s a bit like if you tidy your house, that’s great. But if you don’t have a plan for keeping it tidy then it just gets messy again. So we’re trying to get the house in order and we’re trying to keep it that way.

[00:29:22] The first step, I think, is to audit your email accounts and get rid of anything that you’re not using. So get rid of any unused accounts, get rid of any unused email addresses. And I think the way to approach this, again, if you’re anything like me and you’re sort of keeping these things because you think you need them or you’re worried that at some point you might need something that is buried in the depths of your email. You’re going to manually have to go through that email account.

[00:29:46] Save down or forward to your actual email address anything that you may still want to access. Maybe you have old contacts in those emails. Maybe people have sent you photos or links and you haven’t downloaded them. Maybe you’ll find sentimental messages. So when I started going through my Hotmail account, I had some emails from way back when in 2007 when I was travelling around South America.

[00:30:09] And there were some really lovely sentimental messages that I actually wanted to keep. So I don’t want to lose those. They don’t need to live in my new inbox. So I ended up just PDFing them and saving them down onto my Google Drive, so that I would have them to look back on if I ever wanted to.

[00:30:24] Then, if you use this email address to access any services or platforms, you need to change the username. Change it to your current and most used email address, whether that is a work address or a personal address. Or if it won’t allow you to do it, consider re-registering for those services so that you can still access them using your current email address.

[00:30:45] When it comes to email addresses that you may have created for a specific occasion or event, like a wedding, as we were talking about, try not to hoard. No one is going to be emailing an account for an event that has passed. You have to be brutal about this. If anything is sentimental, as I said, find a way to keep it, but just keep it outside of your current email and outside of the email that you’re about to delete.

[00:31:08] And if you’ve been using an email address as a dummy to sign up for different things, so that your main email address wouldn’t get clogged up in the way that I’ve just described, you might want to think about using something like the Hide my email service from Apple in order to be your fake email address for signups. I will put a link for how to set this service up in the show notes.

[00:31:27] But essentially for the Apple Hide my email service, it generates a unique and a random email address that forwards the mail that it receives automatically to your personal inbox, so to whatever email address that you provide. Each address is unique to you. You can read and you can respond directly to emails that are sent to those addresses, but your personal email address will always be kept private.

[00:31:51] It’s built into the sign in with Apple and iCloud plus. So for most iPhone users, it should be relatively straightforward to use. I know definitely a few times now when I’ve been about to do something, I’ve been given the option to hide my email address, but you do actually need to go in and set it up. I will link the instructions in the show notes.

[00:32:09] And once you’ve gone through this process of saving anything that you want to keep, and deactivating this email from any platforms and services that you use, and clearing out anything that you’re just hoarding for no real reason. You want to make sure that you go and delete these old unused email accounts so that you can start afresh. You will now no longer be the proud owner of 15 different email addresses.

[00:32:32] If you’ve moved any contacts, especially if they’re old contacts, over to your new email address, then make sure that you send a note to those contacts from the account that you want to use going forward. Give them your new email address and ask them to delete old email addresses. This is really important because autocomplete messes this up so often.

[00:32:51] When people go to write email and start typing, the email service provider will automatically bring up whatever has been the most frequently or most commonly used email address. And when you’re typing, people look at names to check it’s correct. They often don’t actually look at the email address to check that it’s correct. So because of this, many people also don’t bother to update or maintain their contacts within their email service provider. It’s usually on their devices themselves.

[00:33:18] So if you don’t remind people or prompt people to do this, there’s a good chance that they’re still going to end up emailing your old email address. And obviously once you’ve closed down that email account, if it’s someone that that was the only way that you were in contact with them, it might prove difficult for them to find you and get in contact with you again in case they need to.

[00:33:34] And this happens more than you think. I actually had a fight with my mum once because my uncle had sent an email about a family gathering and she was having a go at me because I hadn’t replied and saying that, you know, it was a bit rude and disrespectful, etc., etc. And I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. It was only after we’d kind of gone our separate ways in a huff, that I suddenly thought, I wonder if it’s gone to a different email address.

[00:33:58] I went into my Hotmail addresses, and lo and behold, this invitation, this email had gone into an email account that I no longer use. And obviously my uncle hadn’t updated it. So I forwarded it to my current account and then sent a reply. And was probably a bit petty, but I copied my mom in as well. And just said, you know, I’m coming RSVP, but I also said please make sure that you change this I don’t use this email address anymore, so I didn’t see your email.

[00:34:26] So you can see how if you don’t manage the transition of your email accounts in the same way that I guess you would manage if you were moving house and you needed to update people on your address, that things can sometimes go a bit awry. You might miss things that are actually important to you.

[00:34:39] For most people this will now mean that you have just two email accounts, which is wonderful. You’ll have a personal email, you’ll have a work email. Maybe you’ll have a few more, but we’re getting to that in a moment. If you do have more, and you can kind of broadly group them, then my next tip or the next stage is to consider consolidating your mailbox.

[00:34:59] The goal of this is really to stop you having to have multiple different toggles or tabs that you have to go between for different email addresses, and having to sign in and out of different platforms or have different apps. You want to bring everything into one inbox that you can manage from a single app or a single webmail service.

[00:35:17] Now there are different ways to do this, depending on what email service you use and which one is your preference, and also obviously it depends on your personal needs. But it is possible and it will make everything so much more streamlined because you only have to go to one place to check your email, instead of feeling the stress and overwhelm of having to manage four or five or six different platforms and different email inboxes.

[00:35:39] I will put some links in the show notes with instructions for the major providers but, as an example, on Gmail, you can import mail and contacts from other email addresses. You have a “send mail as” feature, which means you can use Gmail to send mail from your other addresses, but from within Gmail. You can also check email from other accounts, so you can pull in new messages. It’s what I do for my personal mail and for the mail related to my small businesses.

[00:36:06] If you’re thinking about doing this for work where you are employed or you’re a contractor, I think it’s very, very important that you have a look at your company’s policies before you do this. You need to be careful that you’re not breaking any policies or any contractual terms by integrating work and personal email.

[00:36:25] A lot of companies’ policies will prevent you from viewing and using and accessing email in your personal email. Even though if you sent email from your work address, but from within Gmail, technically you’re not sending that information to your personal account, I think it’s a bit of a grey area, it’s a bit muddy water. It probably would fall foul of most companies’ policies, especially if there’s any sensitive data involved.

[00:36:51] You may find, for the companies that are really up on their game, that they’ve blocked the ability to do this and import that mail or send mail as anyway, but if they haven’t, it’s always worth checking that you’re not breaking any policies or contractual terms. And the other thing to think about is actually, well, if you only have work and personal accounts, do you actually even want to integrate them? Which is why I said, consider consolidating everything into a mailbox. I don’t think it’s a hard and fast rule.

[00:37:18] Sometimes the separation of work and personal email is good for work-life balance. There are other ways to maintain this boundary, which I’ll talk about in a moment, but sometimes just this clear division of having two separate inboxes is the best way to do it. So you have to decide what is going to work best for you.

[00:37:36] For me personally, I have my personal email address. I have the work email address, which is provided to me wherever I happen to be contracting. I’m a freelancer, so I work for different companies at different times and work with different people. And then for my businesses, I have multiple addresses to separate out different things.

[00:37:54] So I have my own name at this domain name. I have a general enquiries email. I have a customer support email. I have one for privacy and managing information requests. But there’s just me in my organisation. I have these multiple email addresses to enable me to, A, appear a bit more professional, but B, to be able to manage the different requests that may be coming into the business via email because they have different priorities. But they all come into one inbox because it’s just me that needs to manage them.

[00:38:23] And I have to reiterate the point about making it clear which emails you want to use with people because, for example, from the coach training that I did, I was talking about something on a meeting recently and I’ve had some follow-ups come through via email and some reminders. And I’ve actually been receiving those emails to three different email addresses.

[00:38:41] And I’m thinking about it and it’s been a bit annoying because I keep thinking, “Oh, I’m sure I saw this email already, like, didn’t I do something with it?” But, actually, it’s probably my own fault for not being clear about which email address should be used. So, a reminder to make sure that you’re clear about what email address should be used for what purpose, and with what people and what contacts.

[00:38:59] The other thing that I’ve done in terms of consolidating the inbox, and you’ll know this if you’re a Gmail user, is I have ditched Gmail’s inbox categories. By default, Gmail has these tabs. It’s trying to be helpful, it tries to split out any emails that are related to social, emails that are related to promotions, and I actually didn’t like it. So I turned it all off and consolidated everything into a single inbox view, which I much prefer. And then I have different categories and folders, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

[00:39:29] So if that also drives you up the wall, because sometimes it miscategorises things and puts them in the wrong tab, and then you can’t find what you’re looking for, or you miss something that you were expecting, I will put in the show notes a link for how you can get rid of these tabs as well.

[00:39:43] The next thing to do, which I have actually already done, is to set up folders and get organised and declutter what you have. I like to set up folders for the emails that you need to keep or refer back to, and I do that so that the emails don’t have to stay in the inbox but they’re still retrievable or they’re searchable, in case I need them at some point.

[00:40:02] Broadly, they are spread into four types of folder. I have personal folders, and then I have subfolders within that, so it might be stuff to do with the house, stuff to do with finances and money, things to do with friends, when I’ve been studying, things to do with school or university, stuff to do with family, and one for travel because I love to travel and I’m always planning my next getaway.

[00:40:25] For work, as I mentioned before, I have these different email addresses, but everything comes into one view. So I will have different folders for things related to finance and stuff that maybe needs to be managed with my accountant or invoices and receipts. One for customer support. Another one for clients and projects that are actually live, where I’m actually working on things. And another one that relates to learning, as I continuously try to learn and improve my knowledge and my experience that I try to then bring to my clients.

[00:40:51] I also have a to-do folder. This folder contains emails that require an action from me and I put them in there and I mark them as unread, so that I can see the count on the side and use that count as a to-do list almost. And it becomes really satisfying, let me tell you, to work through those emails and take the actions you need to take and see that count go down.

[00:41:11] And the last folder is a to-read folder, which I put emails that need to be digested when I have more time, like all of those different newsletters from the Money Saving Expert and from Jack’s Flight Club etc., that I was talking about earlier. At the time of recording, I’m partway through this because there was a lot. It took me quite a long time to get rid of my other old Hotmail addresses, but you need to go through your emails and you need to file your emails accordingly into those folders, until you reach Inbox Zero.

[00:41:40] Maybe you’ll have some other categories that work for you in your personal and work life but, technically, everything should have a home. If you are filing them under personal or work and under any of those subfolders, those should be things that you’ve already dealt with and it’s just that you need to come back and refer to them at some point.

[00:41:56] If you put them into the to-read or the to-do folder, then you still need to do something with those emails, but they’re not in the main inbox view, so you will be able to see and react to and manage new emails when they come in. And much like before when I was talking about sentimental messages or photos or links that you, for some reason, want to preserve, you should really think about whether information that you’re keeping emails for needs to stay in email.

[00:42:21] So, for example, where you’ve got discount codes because you’re not going to make a purchase immediately. You don’t need to keep the whole email, you just need to copy and paste the discount code and put it in an iNote. I also use Notion. I don’t even know how to describe Notion, I am a new convert. Maybe I’ll do another episode about this at some point. Notion is built on databases, but I have a page, effectively, where I just copy and paste all my discount codes. And if I’m about to make a purchase, then I go and just double check that page to make sure that I don’t have a discount that I can use.

[00:42:53] Something else that I’m working through that’s going to take me a bit of time is all of the flight details and the travel itineraries for all of my travel that, when I was going through the process of booking those flights and booking hotels and booking activities, have kept the confirmations in my email. But once those trips have taken place, I don’t need them.

[00:43:10] I just need to know what these things were, in case I ever need to make a recommendation to someone who’s travelling to somewhere that I’ve already been. Or if I wanted to go back and visit somewhere, and I wanted to stay in the same place or do a similar set of activities with an activity organiser. But I put all of that stuff, because I’m a massive geek, into an Excel spreadsheet anyway. So I don’t actually need all of those emails.

[00:43:33] And let me tell you, as someone that loves to travel and has travelled a lot over the last 20 odd years, that got rid of a lot of emails and I’m still going. So, something to think about. I know you want to keep information, but does it need to stay in your email? And by taking all of these things out, you will also start to solve some of the storage problem that people run into when they start hoarding email.

[00:43:57] So all of those steps kind of cover getting the house in order. It covers getting your email inbox under control and having some kind of way to categorise and organise and declutter everything. But as I said, the second part is really about keeping the house tidy. So, this is one of my favorite things that I discovered while I was preparing for this episode and trying to sort out my own email inbox woes.

[00:44:20] You want to try and find a way to manage email flow, using delays and pauses, and ways to bypass the inbox completely. Most people, including myself, are familiar with delayed sending. So, you maybe are working late and you write an email. But you don’t want to actually send it at that time and have people think that you’re working late, for appearances sake or to annoy them. And so you set it up to send at 9 o’clock the following morning.

[00:44:44] But what about delayed receiving of emails? What about delayed email receipt? What if emails didn’t arrive outside of working hours, even if that’s when they were sent? What if they only arrived in batches at certain times throughout the day, and those times coincided with when you would actually be free to deal with the emails coming in?

[00:45:05] And I was quite excited by this, maybe because I’m a bit geeky and it’s a bit sad, but I was quite excited to find that that technology does exist already. So I will put a link to it in the show notes, of course, but you should think about checking out something called Inbox Pause by Boomerang.

[00:45:22] They have an add-on for Outlook and an add-on for Gmail, which will take care of a lot of users. But essentially what Inbox Pause allows you to do is to set up rules about when you will receive emails. So, maybe you want to designate some time to be personal time or focus time to do work. Or you have periods where you’re in back-to-back meetings or workshops. Or you just don’t want to receive email outside of work hours, like I said.

[00:45:49] So you can set rules that means that email will only arrive in certain periods and in batches, no matter when they’re sent. You can set exceptions to these rules, which is always handy. So maybe there are individual contacts, or if emails have been marked a certain way or contain certain keywords, like urgent, then you can have those emails still come into your inbox and bypass the rules.

[00:46:14] You can set auto-responses, which helps you to manage the expectations of others. So let’s say that people begin emailing you from 9 o’clock and your rules mean that everything is paused until 11 o’clock. You can set up auto-responses that will send automatic messages to people, which acknowledges their email and says I will respond to this message after 11 am.

[00:46:36] And this was the only feature that I’m a little bit iffy about because obviously for the other person, for the recipients, it creates more email. But if you think that people will be offended by not receiving an acknowledgement, or it will help to manage expectations about when you will respond to email, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea.

[00:46:54] So, what happens to all the emails, you’re probably wondering? Well, all of the emails, when you’re in a pause, go into a special folder before coming into your inbox. So they’re held there until you reach the period where the pause is lifted, that you’ve set up in your rules, and you’ll receive all those emails at once.

[00:47:09] But if you set the rules up to align with the way that you’re working, and with what’s going to be my next suggestion in just a moment, then it’s possible to just receive all your emails in one go and deal with them all in one go as well. And avoid being pulled in and out of your email inbox trying to respond to people and being distracted from focusing on the work that you’re trying to do.

[00:47:29] So Inbox Pause really manages the frequency with which you receive emails, so that you don’t become overwhelmed and you don’t become interrupted. Even if you don’t go for Inbox Pause, it’s possible to set up rules within your email client, so within Gmail or within Outlook, that mean that certain emails will bypass your inbox completely.

[00:47:48] So a good example of this is I need to keep the invoices or the bills for services and products that I buy or subscription services that I have for tools that I use in my business. They are needed in order for me to do my accounting at the end of each quarter but they also have to be kept on file for six years, I think it is, in case there is an investigation or an inquiry by our revenue service, by HMRC.

[00:48:12] But I don’t actually have to do anything with those bills and invoices. There’s no action required unless I wanted to go and save them out to a different folder, maybe on my Google Drive. So you can set up a rule that allows emails from certain senders or with certain words in them to bypass your inbox, and that means that those bills and invoices can automatically go to a bills or a finance folder.

[00:48:34] And you can have them marked as unread, if you want, so that you remember, in my case, to go in at the end of every quarter and then just download the PDFs of those invoices and put them on Google Drive. But it’s really handy for things, again, not clogging up your main view, your main inbox. I’ll put a link in the show notes, hopefully I can find some instructions or a video that shows you how to do this, but it’s super handy.

[00:48:55] The next thing that I’d really encourage you to do, and I was talking about this, ironically, in my own email newsletter a few weeks ago, is to set a dedicated time for checking your emails and to take action on every single email you get. Now, I always recommend that you diarise two to three times a day for checking and responding to email, and that means that you don’t get interrupted every six minutes, breaking your flow and distracting you from being present in the moment.

[00:49:21] I like to opt for 15 minutes, 2–3 times a day. And there’s obviously a bonus there, aside from feeling like you’re on top of your email and you’re able to manage it. There’s a boost for your productivity because you specialise in those 15 minutes on just dealing with email, instead of doing an email, going back to writing a report, doing an email, picking up the phone for a phone call, doing an email, grabbing a coffee with your colleague, doing an email, answering a question from your colleague. You’re just less distracted, so you’re able to be more productive.

[00:49:50] But what it also means is that emails don’t languish in your inbox and, again, create that stress. You’ve dealt with everything that’s come in. And if you use something like Inbox Pause, you can time it so that the pause is lifted just before your 15 minutes that you’ve allocated for checking. Which means they will arrive just in time for you to deal with them and then you won’t get any more until the second time that you’ve allocated in the day for checking.

[00:50:13] And to my mind there are really only five options for you in order to take action. The first is you read an email and it requires or it’s possible to give an immediate response or immediate action. So, that can be done in your 15-minute window. Maybe it’s something like you need to RSVP to an invite. Once you’ve done that you can either file the email away in the right folder or you can delete it.

[00:50:35] The second option is an email that requires a response or an action but you’re not able to do it within that 15-minute window. So those are the emails that you move to your to-do folder. You put them in this separate folder and then, if you want extra brownie points, you actually set up time in your calendar for taking action.

[00:50:53] Either you have other 15-minute windows or 30-minute windows throughout your day to take actions arising from emails. Or you add it to your to-do list or you put a calendar block in to deal with it. And as I said before, I like to mark those emails as unread so that the counter shows on that to-do list folder. I kind of use that as an idea of the number of things on my to-do list and my outstanding actions.

[00:51:16] The third option is an email that requires reading but doesn’t actually require any action or any response. So these are things like the newsletters that I do actually really want to read, but I just can’t read them there and then. I need to make time to do it. So those are the ones that get moved into the to-read folder. And again, I’m experimenting at the moment with marking them as unread to see if that prompts me to read them in the time that I’ve set aside.

[00:51:37] The fourth option is just to save or file away an email. So these are informational emails where you don’t need to respond, you don’t need to take any action, you’ve read it, you don’t need to read it again, but you just might need to refer to it in the future or only for a short period. So you those emails to the relevant folder.

[00:51:55] And the last option is obviously to delete. These are the emails that don’t require a response or an action. They don’t need reading. They don’t need saving. You can just delete them. These are also sometimes the ones that maybe you want to watch out for, because this has typically been most people’s way of dealing with unwanted email.

[00:52:14] Instead of dealing with the root cause of the problem, either by asking the sender not to send you those emails anymore, or to take you off of an email chain where you’re copied in, or to unsubscribe from the email, you just keep deleting it. But the problem persists and the emails keep coming. So you want to deal with them once and for all.

[00:52:34] And for me, that basically means going on an unsubscribe spree, which is actually quite therapeutic and quite satisfying. Now, obviously you can manually unsubscribe. So manually unsubscribe from the newsletters and the sales emails that you’re not actually reading. If you do that as and when those emails arrive, slowly over time, you’ll get less volume of email. It obviously depends on the frequency with which those emails are being sent. So if they’re monthly, you’re gonna have to wait till the next monthly email comes in. If they’re daily or weekly, you can obviously deal with them and get to the root of that problem much faster.

[00:53:09] The other thing that has become popular in recent years is unsubscribe services. The one that I first became aware of, and probably the one that’s been around for quite some time, is known as Unroll.Me. And with Unroll.Me, what you can do is you can bulk unsubscribe from unwanted emails, keep the ones that you do actually want, and then roll up anything that you’re still subscribed to into a single daily digest email. So you don’t actually get 10 emails, let’s say, if there’s 10 things you’re subscribed to. You get one email from Unroll and within that email it will list out and link to all the 10 different emails you’ve been sent.

[00:53:45] I’ll be honest, this seems like a great idea, but there’s a few problems with this. The first is using services like Unroll.Me, if you click to say unsubscribe from an unwanted email, doesn’t actually unsubscribe you. All it does is it blocks the sender and it moves emails that come from them into the trash. And it’s very similar to a couple of other services like CleanFox and SaneBox that work in the same way.

[00:54:11] These two platforms, CleanFox and SaneBox, automatically delete unwanted mail from these senders so that you don’t receive them again, and you never have to see them, they never hit your inbox. And they move old messages from those servers into the trash. The problem is, because they are just moving things into folders or blocking senders, if you stop using these services, those emails will start appearing in your inbox again. So it’s not really a permanent solution.

[00:54:38] The bigger problem is that these kinds of services are a privacy risk, not just in case there’s a breach, but also because they’re able to scan your emails and, in some cases, sell the data that they extract. So when you sign up for Unroll.Me, you actually become part of Nielsen IQ’s online shopping panel and you’re giving the service permission to automatically recognise commercial emails that come into your inbox and extract purchase information from them.

[00:55:06] So, in case that went over your head, the app is analysing the content of your emails and selling the information that it finds to make money. And most people aren’t aware of this. Most people don’t read the privacy policies. They’re too long. Who’s got time for that? You just see the benefits of having a service that will stop all of these millions of subscription emails that you’re receiving and put them all into one roll up.

[00:55:30] But the privacy issue is a big problem. So if you value your privacy, I really strongly recommend that you stay away from services like this, and I would also stay away from services like CleanFox and SaneBox because, ultimately, they’re not dealing with the root cause of the problem. And it’s for this reason that Unroll.Me is not even available in the EU anymore because it was failing all of the GDPR regulations, so I think it mostly targets and is used in the US now.

[00:55:56] As I was researching, because I was trying to find out for myself, as well as for you guys, if there is a service that’s similar to Unroll.Me but without all these privacy issues and as a more permanent solution, I did come across a service called CleanMail. Full disclosure, I haven’t tried it but I will link it in the show notes in case you want to have a look. It works with all email providers and the company claims that they only access the envelope and header information that’s associated with your email, so they don’t actually read the contents of your email.

[00:56:26] It works in the EU, so I’m going to assume that they are compliant with Europe’s GDPR regulations, and they say that they don’t share data with third parties. So you’re probably wondering, well, what’s the catch? And the catch is this: Unroll.Me is free and CleanMail has a monthly cost associated with it. It was, currently when I looked, about £12 a calendar month for one email address. But this also gives me a little bit more confidence that they are doing what they say they’re doing because if they’re charging you for this service, it means they don’t need to harvest and sell your data as a way to make money.

[00:57:01] As I said, I’ve not tried it, so I can’t outright recommend it, but I’d love to know if you do try it, how you find it. And if you want me to try it and then feedback on my experiences, then let me know. Maybe I’ll do another episode about it, or maybe I’ll do a YouTube that might be a bit easier for you to see the screen and see what’s happening and what it does with the email. Leave a comment on the podcast if you are listening on Spotify, or in the show notes you’ll also find the address to email me and let me know. I will add it to my to-do list.

[00:57:29] You know in an ideal world, you wouldn’t need any of these services. But I think it is useful for all of those spam subscriptions that you end up having, which I mentioned before. And to counteract the impact of data breaches where your email address has been leaked. And, of course, those really pesky abandoned cart emails that you never asked for.

[00:57:47] The final step is a really easy one, actually, and we talk a lot about notifications on this podcast, but it’s about resetting notifications. So, first and foremost, obviously, ditch the duplicates! Turn off email notifications and reminders for platforms where you are already getting an in-app notification. You do not need to receive that same notification and information twice.

[00:58:07] I also think it’s helpful to turn off email previews because I think that, in addition to the red notification badges that start to get your stress levels up and draw away your attention, being able to kind of scan the first bit of emails also creates a degree of intrigue that makes you open up the email and distracts you from whatever you were doing.

[00:58:28] And this might be a bit too far for some people, but I think it could help: consider turning off your email notifications altogether. If you are going to be setting up specific times for checking your email, like I’ve recommended, you don’t need the stress of notifications in your life because you will see all the emails at the time that you’ve decided to take a look at them.

[00:58:48] So, this is my master plan for how to reach the nirvana of inbox zero. As I said, I’m part way through working through these stages. And I think if anybody has been stressed out and overwhelmed and struggling to take control of their email inbox like I have, then hopefully you have found this episode useful and you’re able to follow along each of the steps as well to reclaim your inbox.

[00:59:11] As always, it’s time for the weekly challenge. So if you’re new around here, every week I set a challenge to help you improve your tech-life balance, mostly to make sure that you actually take action and do something about all of these challenges that we experience with technology in our lives that we discuss on the podcast each week.

[00:59:28] So your weekly challenge this week is to see if you can unsubscribe from 5 emails that you never read. It seems like a really small thing, but it can actually be a big thing. You will automatically get less emails that you don’t want and getting less emails that you don’t want equals less overwhelm and less stress.

[00:59:49] Just think about it. If you were signed up to a subscription or a newsletter that was sending you daily emails and you unsubscribe from 5 of those, 5 daily emails means 150 less emails a month for a 30-day month, so for the month of September. And I think that feels pretty good.

[01:00:08] So see if you can unsubscribe from 5 emails that you never read and then let me know how you get on in The Digital Diet Lounge, which is my dedicated community space for all things digital wellness and women. It’s a lovely little forum, I will put the link in the show notes, and I will probably start updating, I think, there.

[01:00:26] This is one of those topics which, when I thought about it, had so many steps and so many things that needed to be done that it’s not something that I’m going to be able to do in a week. And it’s definitely not something that I would expect you guys to be able to do in a week either. So we’re all in this together but we are on this quest to reclaim our email inboxes, and I am sure that we can get there if we follow all of these steps and stick to the plan.

[01:00:49] I will link everything in the show notes, as I’ve said, and the show notes can be found over on my website at thedigitaldietcoach.com/033.

[01:00:59] I’m off to continue my quest to reclaim my inbox and I know that you’re busy and your time is incredibly valuable. So as always, I thank you for choosing to spend a little bit of your day with me and I’ll see you next time.