Endless tasks, infinite newsletters, and spam galore.

Well, what if I told you that everything you're doing

when it comes to your inbox is wrong

and that by following a few simple steps

you could change everything, saving you hours each week?

Or you could just light your laptop on fire.

So I realize this is not exactly

the sexiest topic in the world to talk about.

Email can be a little bit boring,

but I think it's really important,

and that's the reason I'm making this video

because when it comes to your productivity,

email can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

I wanna really get into the what and the why.

So why am I setting up these systems?

What does it really look like?

Not so much the how.

You can figure out the how with

a couple quick Google searches,

but I genuinely geek out about this stuff.

I love talking about the systems and the tactics

and the nitty-gritty things that really help to make my life

efficient and then save me a whole lot of stress,

and most importantly, time.

So let's just get right into it.

First, I think it's important to talk

about how we typically use email.

It can often be a source of distraction.

We constantly check it multiple times every hour,

and that repetitive checking can slow us down

and pull us away from our work.

By choosing to batch emails once or twice a day,

if your current work allows it,

you'll be able to quickly fly through emails

and spend more time in the flow of work.

In truth, this is an ideal that I don't always live up to.

I often find myself stuck in my inbox repeatedly

checking over and over again throughout the day,

and that's okay, but when I do this,

I definitely find myself being more productive,

more in flow.

One of the ways that I avoid my inbox and also help myself

to move the needle on certain projects

is to create a shortcut on Google Chrome.

So this bookmark here is to compose email.

When I click it, it will open a dialog

that allows me to write an email message.

The great thing about it is that I can skip my inbox

and send important emails to get projects moving forward.

So if you use Gmail, I've got a link in the description

so you can just copy and paste that

into your own bookmarks and it will work.

With everything in this video and videos in the future,

all of the references are gonna be

in the description down below.

So let's get right into my actual email inbox.

So this is usually what I see when I login to Gmail.

I'll have 10 to 15 emails in my inbox,

some of them new, a few of them have been read,

but are tasks and things that I need to do in the future.

I often use email to manage tasks.

A lot of times emails are very simple, quick responses,

but sometimes they require 30 minutes, 60 minutes of work.

I have to compress out and upload

a video that might take me hours.

And so, sometimes I will take these

tasks and put 'em on a to-do list.

That's really if I'm being OCD

and I wanna get to inbox zero.

A lot times I'll just leave 'em right in my inbox,

and then, eventually over the coming days

as I find time for it I will get to them.

If it's in my inbox, it will get done,

it will get responded to.

The trick is that I don't let everything

get into my inbox to begin with.

I'll talk about that in just a second,

but first, I wanna cover some basics.

So I've enabled a feature called auto-advance,

which means that when I delete, archive, or reply

to a message it's gonna automatically

take me to the next email in line.

I also turned on this feature called send and archive,

so whenever I reply to a email,

it will automatically archive it, removing it from my inbox.

This way I can just quickly do a pass through all my emails,

cleaning up my inbox as I go.

As you'll see on the left-hand side of the screen

I've created labels for different categories of email.

The search function in Gmail is really powerful,

but it can only go so far.

Creating and managing emails through labels

can really help you find items and information

from projects that occur over the course of months.

So every time I get an email related to our wedding

I drag it into the wedding label.

All receipts from my business go in the receipts label,

and travel, itinerary, and tickets can be found under

travel 2020 in the designated destination label.

This has saved me a lot of headaches during travel.

I also have a label called subscriptions

that are the newsletters that I subscribe to.

So on that note, I am absolutely ruthless

when it comes to unsubscribing from emails.

If I buy a sweater and somebody puts me

on their newsletter without my permission,

I get very upset,

I will mark you as spam and I'll unsubscribe.

Get outta my inbox.

That's just one way that I'm able

to keep my email clutter-free.

Some of the labels like incoming, podcast, and newsletter

are how I organize all my unique email addresses.

I have multiple email addresses,

and all of them filter into one of these labels.

Incoming is my email address for people who reach out

to me via the contact page on my website.

Newsletter is another unique email

that I have set up for my newsletter.

Podcast is my email address that I use

for all of my podcast-related activities.

All of these email addresses help me to keep track

of incoming opportunities so I don't miss anything

and reply to people who wanna get in touch with me.

The most important step I've taken to keep

all of this organized is to create filters for each

of these email addresses so they automatically skip my

inbox and go directly into one of these designated labels.

This is an automated system.

You set it up once, and now,

all your emails automatically filter into a specific label.

This is a absolute game changer,

and it has saved me so much time, and also,

gotten me to be really clear on what emails I'm checking

and what mindset I'm in when I'm checking them.

In addition to setting up filters for my different

email addresses I've also created one

for the newsletters I subscribe to.

So all of these newsletters automatically

filter into my subscription label.

So one thing that I started to do just a couple

months ago is whenever a receipt comes

into my inbox and it's something,

a place that I know I'm gonna be

purchasing from again for business,

say it's a coffee shop,

it's a place where I get cameras from,

it's an Amazon purchase,

I wanna make sure that automatically

filters into my receipts.

To do that, I just take the email address that it came from,

and then, I put it on that filter.

And then, I can just continue to add as many

email addresses as I want to that specific

filter sending everything to receipts.

That's a tip that I got from Thomas Frank,

so thank you much sir, thank you my sir.

Let's talk about templates.

If you find yourself constantly writing the same email

over and over and over again you can use templates

to save you hours of drafting the same exact message.

I've created a few template responses

to commonly asked questions that I get.

Sometimes I'll tweak and customize them,

but even having a starting point

of a response saves me a ton of time.

Let's look at some examples.

If someone didn't get my newsletter,

this happens pretty often,

it's usually in their spam folder,

so I have a reply for that.

Back when we released our documentary "Minimalism"