Your Inbox Is Not Your To-Do List

If the first thing you do every morning is open your inbox, there’s a good chance somebody else is deciding what you’ll work on today.

Email is supposed to be a communication tool. Somewhere along the way, however, it became a task manager, filing cabinet, reminder system, source of anxiety and seemingly endless list of things other people would quite like us to do.

For leaders, the problem can be particularly acute. Employees need decisions, clients want answers, suppliers have questions and colleagues need approval. Throw in newsletters, automated notifications and the occasional email mysteriously marked “URGENT” despite being anything but, and your inbox can easily consume an enormous part of the working day.

The danger isn’t simply that email takes up too much time. It’s that we start allowing whatever arrives most recently to determine what deserves our attention.

Being responsive isn’t the same as being productive

There is something deeply satisfying about answering emails. Every response provides a tiny sense of completion. Reply. Archive. Delete. Next.

Spend an hour doing it and you can feel extremely productive. But what did you actually accomplish?

You may have answered 25 people while postponing the strategy document that needed your concentration. You might have resolved several minor questions while avoiding the difficult decision that only you can make. You could reach lunchtime having been extraordinarily busy without making any progress on the things that matter most.

Responsiveness has value, particularly when you lead an organisation. People shouldn’t routinely wait days for decisions they need from you. But responding quickly to everything isn’t necessarily good leadership.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is ignore your inbox for an hour.

Every email is somebody else’s priority

An email arrives because somebody wants something. They may need information, approval, a decision, a document, your opinion or simply your attention.

Their request may be completely reasonable and genuinely important. But the fact that it has just appeared at the top of your inbox doesn’t automatically make it the most important thing you should be doing.

This is where email quietly starts controlling the working day.

You open your inbox intending to check one message. Another catches your attention. You answer it. That reminds you of something else. You forward another email, somebody responds immediately and suddenly you’ve spent 45 minutes inside a chain of activity you never intended to start.

Meanwhile, the priority you identified that morning hasn’t moved.

Decide what’s important before opening the inbox

One simple habit can make an enormous difference: decide what matters today before looking at what everybody else wants from you.

That might mean identifying the two or three things you genuinely want to accomplish that day. They don’t need to be enormous tasks. The point is that you’ve chosen them deliberately rather than allowing your inbox to choose them for you.

Once you open email, other people’s priorities inevitably enter the room.

Knowing your own priorities first gives you something against which to judge those requests. Does this email genuinely require attention now, or can it wait? Does this need you personally, or could somebody else handle it? Is this actually important, or has the sender simply labelled it urgent?

Your inbox becomes information you process rather than instructions you automatically obey.

Stop treating every notification like a knock at the door

Imagine trying to write an important report while somebody knocks on your office door every three minutes. You probably wouldn’t tolerate it for long.

Yet many of us willingly recreate exactly that environment through email notifications. A banner appears. A sound goes off. A little red number increases. Even when we don’t open the message, part of our attention has already moved towards it.

Turning off unnecessary email notifications can be surprisingly liberating. You don’t need to know the precise second every message arrives. Unless your role requires an immediate response, most emails can comfortably wait until you deliberately choose to check them.

Email doesn’t need to be a live conversation.

Try checking email rather than living in it

For some leaders, closing email completely for long periods isn’t realistic. But there is a significant difference between checking your inbox regularly and keeping it permanently open beside everything else you’re trying to accomplish.

Experiment with specific periods for processing email. That might mean checking first thing after you’ve established your priorities, again around lunchtime and later in the afternoon. Other leaders may need to check considerably more frequently. The exact schedule matters less than the principle: you decide when you enter your inbox rather than your inbox constantly demanding that you return.

If you’re worried people won’t be able to reach you in a genuine emergency, establish another route for genuinely urgent issues. Once your team knows how to contact you when something really cannot wait, every email no longer needs to be treated as potentially critical.

Not every email deserves a task

Another common trap is reading an email, deciding you’ll deal with it later and leaving it unread as a reminder.

Soon your inbox contains hundreds or thousands of messages, some representing tasks, some representing information and some representing absolutely nothing except the fact you haven’t decided what to do with them.

If an email creates genuine work that needs to happen later, move that action into whatever system you use to manage your work. Your calendar, task manager or written list should tell you what needs doing. Your inbox should tell you what people have sent you.

Those are two different jobs.

Ask whether you should be receiving it at all

If your inbox is permanently overwhelming, better email management may only solve part of the problem.

Look at what is actually arriving.

Are you copied into conversations you don’t need to see? Are employees seeking approval for decisions they should be empowered to make themselves? Are reports being emailed to you that you never read? Are automated systems sending unnecessary notifications? Have you accidentally trained your team to ask you about everything?

Sometimes an overloaded inbox is a symptom of a wider leadership problem.

Delegating decisions, clarifying responsibilities and removing yourself from unnecessary communication can reduce email far more effectively than becoming exceptionally good at processing it.

Create some protected thinking time

One of the things leadership requires that rarely appears on a formal task list is thinking.

Thinking about where the organisation is going. Thinking through a difficult problem. Considering whether something is working. Developing an idea. Preparing properly for an important conversation.

Those activities don’t produce the same immediate satisfaction as clearing 30 emails, but they may be considerably more valuable.

Protecting periods of uninterrupted time gives your brain the opportunity to work on problems that can’t be solved in three-minute bursts between messages.

Your organisation probably doesn’t need its leader to become the world’s fastest email responder.

It needs you to think.

The inbox will never be finished

Perhaps the most important thing to accept is that email is an infinite system.

You can reach inbox zero at 10am and have another collection waiting by lunchtime. There is no final email after which the internet congratulates you and everybody agrees never to contact you again.

Trying to “finish” email before starting your important work therefore makes little sense. You may spend your entire working life waiting for an empty inbox that never arrives.

Instead, decide what matters, protect time for it and allow email to occupy an appropriate part of your day rather than becoming the structure around which everything else revolves.

Because your inbox contains things other people would like you to think about.

Your to-do list should contain the things you’ve decided are worth your time.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.