Email and productivity: how to spend less time in Gmail

I'm Alec, founder of Gmail Unsubscribe and Baxter. Most people who install our extension don't describe the problem as "too much mail." They say email is eating their day. It's the same problem, but the second way of putting it points at the fix.

Email costs you time in two ways. There's the time spent reading and sorting it, and there's the time lost every time it interrupts something else. Both get smaller when less mail arrives, so that's where this guide starts.

Where the time goes

A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that knowledge workers spend about 28% of the work week on email. It's an old number and your job may be very different. The more useful thing is to look at your own inbox for a week and sort what arrives into three buckets:

Kind of mail	Needs you?	Best fix
People writing to you	Yes	Reply on a schedule
Receipts, alerts, confirmations	Rarely	Filter and label
Newsletters, promotions, marketing	No	Unsubscribe

In most inboxes the third bucket is the biggest, and it's the one that asks nothing of you. Each message still costs a glance and a decision to ignore it. That's a small cost, repeated dozens of times a day.

Step 1: cut the inflow

Reading faster is a weak lever. Receiving less is a strong one.

Start by unsubscribing from lists you haven't opened in a month. Our extension's scan lists every subscription sender with how many emails they've sent you, and the average first scan finds about 15 of them. You can do it by hand too, and how to mass unsubscribe in Gmail walks through that route.

Two honest caveats:

• Some unsubscribes fail. In our own data, roughly a third of unsubscribe attempts hit senders with no working unsubscribe mechanism at all. We tell you when one fails so you can filter or block that sender instead. Some tools hide this by quietly filing the mail in Trash, which only looks like it worked.
• Spam is a different case. For senders you never signed up with, use Report spam instead. Is it safe to unsubscribe from emails explains where that line sits.

Step 2: automate the routine mail

Some mail you want but don't need to read. Receipts, shipping updates and bank alerts are the usual ones. A Gmail filter can label them and skip the inbox, so they're searchable later and out of your way now.

Start with a label only and check that the filter catches what you expect. Add Skip the Inbox once you trust it. Seven Gmail automation rules lists the filters worth building, and Gmail auto archive covers the archive step.

One warning: a filter that archives too much can hide mail you needed. Keep filters narrow, matching one sender or one clear phrase.

Step 3: check email on a schedule

Constant checking is what makes email feel like a second job. Every glance pulls you away from what you were doing, and it takes a while to get back into it.

A simple schedule works for most people:

1. Pick three or four times a day to open Gmail. Late morning, after lunch and near the end of the day is a common pattern.
2. Close the tab between those times.
3. Turn off phone and desktop notifications for Gmail, except for the few senders who can't wait.
4. In your first session, deal with anything that takes under two minutes. Snooze the rest.

If your job needs fast replies, shorten the gaps instead of dropping the schedule. Checking hourly still beats checking constantly.

Step 4: make decisions once

Reading a message and leaving it in the inbox means you'll read it again. Give each message a decision the first time:

• Reply now if it takes under two minutes.
• Snooze it to the day you'll deal with it. Gmail's snooze brings it back to the top at the time you pick.
• Archive it if it's reference. Search will find it later.
• Delete it if it's worthless.

That's the core of inbox zero, and you don't need to reach an empty inbox for it to help. Even keeping the inbox to one screen of live mail makes it faster to scan.

Step 5: use a few Gmail features well

You don't need a stack of apps. A few built-in features cover most of it:

• Keyboard shortcuts. Turn them on under Settings, See all settings, Keyboard shortcuts. Then e archives and # deletes, according to Google's shortcut list. Working through a batch with the keyboard is much quicker than clicking.
• Search operators. from:, older_than: and has:attachment find almost anything in seconds, which means you don't need a folder system to stay organized. Labels vs folders explains how labels fit in.
• Priority notifications. Limit alerts to the senders you've marked important.

What to expect

You won't get this all done in one afternoon, and you don't need to. Unsubscribing alone usually shows a difference within a week, because the daily volume drops and stays down. The other steps are habits, and they take a couple of weeks to stick.

If you want a one-sitting cleanup first, Gmail Unsubscribe covers it.

Common questions

How much time do people spend on email?

A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that knowledge workers spend about 28% of the work week reading and answering email. That figure is more than a decade old and varies a lot by job, so treat it as a rough benchmark and measure your own week.

Does checking email less often make you more productive?

For most people, yes, as long as the gaps are short enough that nobody is left waiting on something urgent. Checking at set times, say three or four a day, avoids the constant context switching of reacting to every notification.

What is the fastest way to cut email volume?

Unsubscribe from lists you do not read. For most inboxes, subscription mail is the largest share of what arrives, and it never stops on its own. Our average first scan finds about 15 subscription senders.

Should I turn off Gmail notifications?

Turn off desktop and phone notifications for everything except the senders you cannot afford to miss. Gmail can notify for high priority mail only, which leaves most of the inbox quiet until you open it.

Do email productivity tools actually help?

Tools that remove mail before it reaches you, like unsubscribing and filters, save the most time. Tools that add another place to check can make the problem worse. Start with the volume, then decide if you need anything else. See inbox zero for the routine.

Want it done for you? Gmail Unsubscribe finds every mailing list in your Gmail and unsubscribes you from the ones you pick, through each sender's own unsubscribe. The free plan covers 25 senders a month, unsubscribed and cleared out.

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