How I Finally Put My Email on AUTOPILOT

— and stopped doing it the hard way

Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash

I won’t beat about the bush. Email was driving me crazy.

Not in the “I hate my inbox” way. It’s seriously ruining my mornings, my quiet, and my attention. It seemed like I was entering a room with 500 people yelling at me every day, and half of them were attempting to sell me something I didn’t ask for.

When I woke up, I would open my laptop and immediately wish I wasn’t living. There was a lot of mess in my inbox.

Spammers with cunning subject lines, coworkers who never answered, follow-ups I always forgot to send, and unexpected cold pitches that snuck past every spam filter like cockroaches slipping under the door.

I felt I was being “responsible” by checking everything myself. But really? I was sending emails in the dumbest way conceivable.

Then one day, I asked myself a nasty but valid question:

“Why the hell am I still doing this the hard way when there are better tools out there?”

That’s when I learnt how to set my email to work on its own. And my life hasn’t been the same since.

I’m going to tell you precisely what broke me, what I did to fix it, and how I eventually quit being a fool and drowning in email.

The Moment I Lost It

I had a big presentation to give. I got up early, made coffee, sat down, and said to myself, “I’ll just clear a few emails first.”

You already know what occurred.

I was still lost in the swamp two hours later. Eliminating spam one at a time and reviewing false proposals, while forgetting what was significant. I was trying to recall if I had talked to Bonnie about the retreat I was organising in May.

I couldn’t concentrate. I was out of energy. And what about the presentation? Not even begun.

That was the day I knew I needed a plan.

The harsh fact is this:

• Email never stops coming.

• You can’t “win” by clicking quicker.

• The more you succeed, the worse it gets.

• I was waging a war I couldn’t win.

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