Why you need to stop emailing NOW
My current counter is at 161 and that doesn't suddenly make me feel warm or cold. I know that they are mainly ‘nonsense emails’. Press releases, calls from favorite online stores; everything I can really miss. A well-known Instagram phenomenon once whispered to me that she sometimes just deleted her entire inbox to create some peace. ‘If there is really an important email in there, they will send it again.’ Paulien Cornelisse also wrote about it on Saturday in the Volkskrant. A Himalayan mountain of emails had formed in her inbox and she had to do something about it. Deleting was too much for her, but moving everything to the archive in one go and seeing the counter go from 1461 to 0 was a celebration. She hadn't climbed the Himalayas, but she had moved them.
Here are some email facts in a row.
- We spend an average of three hours a day on our mail.
- We receive an average of 126 emails per day.
- Many things go wrong due to email bombs.
- Especially everyone in CC is dangerous. As a result, no one really feels responsible.
- Long emails are deadly.
- Emails are often pseudo-active. If I receive an intensely long email but the salutation is ‘Dear journalist/blogger’, I don't read further. I really have a huge dislike for general emails.
E-toxing, or the email diet, is done like this:
- Stop CC'ing and BCC'ing. If you want to tell someone that you emailed someone, just send a short message.
- Check your mail only two times a day, reserve a fixed number of minutes for that.
- Also something like this: don't do ‘reply to all’; it's email pollution and again no one will feel addressed.
- Go on an email diet with your entire team, otherwise it won't work.
- Call to discuss something. If someone from a PR agency calls me and really has something nice that fits Amayzine or Franska, I'm much more inclined to do something with it than with a soulless email.
- Want to not email more? Order the book We Quit Mail by Kim Spinder or attend a workshop with her (although you might not have time for that either...).
This way you become the boss of your own mailbox again and not ruled from the outside by everything and everyone. I'm going to try it.
Image: Lidian van Megen
