A few months ago, I re-watched the romantic classic, You’ve Got Mail.

I couldn’t help thinking about how sweet and dated it was! Little dial-up noises, and the joy that we used to feel when we’d hear the cheerful, ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ notification from AOL. Nowadays, most of us have far more email than we want or can handle.

It’s become the defacto form of communication for business and personal life, which also means that we receive anywhere from 50 to 500 emails daily. That’s why the skill to manage our email flow has become critical to our personal productivity. However, while I know that we’re not going to be eliminating this form of communication any time soon, we need to remember that email is NOT our friend. If left untamed, it’s definitely not constructive to our overall wellbeing.

A study conducted and presented in 2016 by Dr. Richard MacKinnon at the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference, found that by reducing the number of times we check our email, we can significantly reduce our stress levels. Additionally, most respondents reported checking their email early morning impacted their mood for the rest of the day and added more stress. That’s why changing this one facet of your workflow can have a dramatic impact on your whole life.

To help you improve your email stress, let’s dive into the top 5 tips to handle our email inbox better:

1 – PUT YOUR AGENDA FIRST!
The biggest problem with being addicted to our email inbox is that it’s a reactive rather than proactive mode of living. If we spend our work hours always replying to other people’s messages, then we’re not taking the time to work on the proactive and creative work that’s important to us.

Replying to everyone else’s questions and needs don’t move our priorities forward. Email is not one of our “Big Rocks,” as Stephen Covey would say. So, the best way to put email ‘in its place,’ is to know what our priorities are and work on them first.

Unfortunately, many people are so accustomed to running their day from their inbox that they don’t even know how to identify their priorities outside of it.

• TO DO
  • Prioritize Your Tasks: As strange as it sounds, to get unstuck from your email inbox; you might need to stop and figure out what you would want to be working on instead.
    If you’re unclear about what work you want to be doing, then email becomes a great way to ‘feel productive’ while getting very little of substance done.
  • Choose Your “One Thing:” I teach my clients to choose their Inspired Action each day. Your Inspired Action is the one task that will move your priorities forward. It is a commitment to yourself. Come hell or high water; this one task will get done before you finish work or go to sleep that day.
    
    

• BENEFITS
  • We get to complete our tasks which are most important to our overall success.
  • When email distracts us from our Inspired Action, then we’re giving away our power to direct our focus, time, and energy to other people’s agendas rather than our priorities. Danger Will Robinson! Not a good way to be effective.
    
    

So, know what’s most important to you, and put your agenda and priorities first.