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How I Cut Down My Email Time by 90%
The process comes from Nir Eyal’s new book ‘Indistractable‘
Everybody has an email problem. But mine was ruining my life.
I make my money as a writer, but I was spending more time writing emails than writing books. It got so bad that I started leaving the country any time I had a deadline, just to make it harder to access my inbox. Life pro-tip: Fleeing to Mexico is not a sustainable solution to email overload.
Then last year, my friend Nir Eyal sent me an early copy of his new book, Indistractable. It’s all about how to take back your life from the apps and people pulling you away from what’s important. The whole thing had me furiously taking notes, but the chapter on email, without a doubt, changed my life.
Nir makes the case that tech companies use external triggers to hack our attention, and it’s up to us to “hack back” our time. Doing so requires digging into the root causes of why we get distracted, going deeper than simply pointing to the clever design of email apps and services. There’s something about how we think and behave that allows these tools to get to us.
In my case, it was a constant, low-level anxiety about what I was potentially missing that drove me to open up my email about 30 times an hour. My email app played on that…
