Stop email overload driving you crazy!

Too much email will drive you crazy and it’s about time we stop the email overload.

Everyone knows that email is the number one thing that sucks up all of your time and stops you getting on with the interesting work that will actually benefit your business. But we carry on living in our inboxes and spending too much time sorting through all the crap in order to get to the interesting emails.

The past couple of years I’ve been using a handy piece of software called Sanebox. It has massively cut down on the amount of time I have to spend on email, so have more time to do the interesting and important things, like writing blogs about business.

How Sanebox works

Sanebox goes through your past emails and works out who are the special people who you actually want to hear from. Initially, it does this by looking at who you’ve actually spoken to by email before, and whose emails you’ve bothered to open. This takes about 10 minutes.

It then sets up another folder for you where it puts everything else. All the email newsletters that you never asked for in the first place, all the rubbish from Netflix telling you about programs that you would never dream of watching, and all those annoying little notices from Twitter. This folder is called “SaneLater”, and the idea is that you look at it just once a day. So you don’t miss anything, in case there is anything interesting there, especially emails from a new person you might not have talked to before but could be a potential new client or something you’re really interested in.

What difference does it make?

I find it really useful. I can concentrate on the people that I really want to talk to, the important people like my clients, and my friends. Everyone else goes into the SaneLater, and I’ll find them when I pop in once a day. I’ll delete most of these, or occasionally transfer them over to my inbox, because only people that I do want to talk to. It stops the email overload.

The black hole

The other part of Sanebox which I find really useful is the black hole. You know those pesky people who keep emailing you even when you unsubscribe from their list? The people who give email marketing a bad name for the rest of us? You can drag one of their emails into the black hole, and it will just delete anything that ever comes from them ever again. So they can send you this stupid E blasts as much as they like, but you never have to bother looking at them. I get a lovely little feeling of revenge when I do this.

Does it cost money?

Sanebox does cost $59 a year. But it’s one of those things that I’m happy to pay for because I get my time back, and it stops me being grumpy.  Check it out for yourself, there’s a free trial and you can see what you think…Sanebox

Note – this isn’t an affiliate link, I won’t get any money from it, I just like it, and am too busy to find their affiliate programme if they even have one.