Email inboxes are out of control. The average office worker receives 121 emails every workday and sends an additional 40 emails [source]. Most managers cite emails piling up throughout the week as a primary source of stress. If you’re one of those people, you likely don’t need another strategy for getting through the email. Instead, you need less email. Luckily the path to less email is straightforward.

1. Analyze the most common reasons you’re receiving emails.
2. Plan a strategy for each of the identified causes.
3. Implement your strategy.
4. Review your results to ensure your plan worked.

To make this even easier, we’ve identified the most common contributors to email overload along with strategies that work for each.

What are the most common reasons for receiving unnecessary emails?

1. Your staff copies you on everything.
2. People outside your team copy you on everything.
3. People are continually escalating issues with your team.
4. Your company sends a lot of low or no-value emails.
5. You receive emails that are only useful at certain times.
6. You are getting spam from outside your company.
7. You’re on a large email distribution where people keep replying to either remove them or to tell everyone that they shouldn’t reply all.

Now that you know the primary causes of unwanted emails let’s get right into how to prevent them.

How can you prevent your staff from copying you on every email?

Your staff copying you on every email can easily be the largest contributor to your growing inbox. Luckily it is also one of the most manageable causes. It just requires a little coaching from you.  

Start by speaking with your team generally about the subject. Let your team know that while it’s great that they keep you informed, you want to empower them to operate independently. They can still keep you informed via a weekly email if needed.  

Once you’ve spoken to the team generally, you’ll want to reinforce your message during 1-on-1 coaching time with them. Review some recent examples where you feel they copied you unnecessarily. If possible, also review a few samples of where they copied you correctly.

You’ll need to coach them on an ongoing basis as well. At some point, your team will needlessly copy you again. Either forward the email back asking for a justification or mark it in your agenda for review during your next one-on-one.

How can you prevent employees who are not your direct reports from copying you on every email?

This is one of the most challenging reasons to address, as you often have the least control over it. If the CEO of the company wants to copy you on a bunch of stuff you think is pointless, you’re probably never going to be able to fix that. All is not lost, though. There are still a few strategies to address this.

If the emails are primarily directed toward your team, pay attention to how long a response takes. Slow response time from your team can be a primary reason you’re receiving these types of emails. In your next one on one with your staff, investigate how long it usually takes them to respond to the largest offenders. If this turns out to be the issue, then the simple fix is to have your staff focus on responding quicker. Help your team by defining an expectation and then share that expectation with the other groups who copied you. Send them an email stating that you recognized they were copying you due to slow response times and that you’ve addressed an updated expectation with your team. If the problem is not solved, they should bring it to your attention, but from now on, they can leave you off the CC line and still be confident that they’ll get a timely response.

If the emails are instead primarily directed toward people from other departments, you’ll need to employ a different strategy. Start by responding to the sender and asking them what they’re looking for in a response from you. Do this a few times, and they’ll either give you a reason to care about the email or, more likely, they’ll stop copying you. If they don’t stop and can’t provide you with a reasonable answer, then provide them with further explanation. Explain that you strive to get back to everyone quickly and that one of the ways you do that is by making sure you only get essential emails. Them sending you things that aren’t necessary is hurting your ability to respond to others’ meaningful work. For the best results, try using the Situation-Behavior-Impact method when delivering your feedback.

How can you prevent unnecessary escalation emails?

Email isn’t the problem here. The fact that your team’s work required an escalation is the problem. Investigate the source of the problem and work on fixing that. You’ll want to assess if your team has the tools, training, direction, and judgment to effectively do their jobs. Fix any one of those, and you’ll find the escalation emails decrease in turn.

How can you eliminate low or no-value emails?

Just because an email comes from an internal email address doesn’t mean it isn’t spam. Aggressively get rid of emails that have zero value. As an example, back when I used to work in a physical office, we had an employee engagement committee that would do various “morale-boosting” activities. One of those was popcorn day once a week. It was a fairly big hit with people, but they sent an email every week to announce that it was popcorn day and anyone could come to get some free popcorn. It was the same time every week, and I never ate any popcorn. This email was worthless to me. So I created a rule that automatically archived the emails. I never had to waste time with an email about popcorn day again.  

Step-by-step instructions from Microsoft Support:  Manage email messages by using rules

If you use Gmail instead, see this Zapier article:  How to create an email filter in Gmail.

How to handle emails that aren’t useful right now?

Some emails aren’t useful to read until you need them. For instance, IT departments often send out emails when there’s a system outage. If you try to request PTO through my companies HR system and receive an error, you would want to know if IT is aware of the issue. However, if you don’t need to go into the HR system, do you care that that particular system is down? Probably not. Send these types of emails directly to the archive and only look for them when you need to.

Another example of this is an agile ticketing system like JIRA. Whenever a request is updated, if you’re listed as a watcher or as the requestor, you get an automated email. If you can change the email notification setting, turn it off. However, your IT department may restrict your ability to do so. In that case, set up a rule that skips the inbox and sends those emails straight to an archive folder. You don’t need the distraction of an email every time a change occurs. Instead, make a habit of regularly checking a summary of the changes within the system. Once or twice a day is usually sufficient, and you can schedule it on your calendar if you have trouble remembering.  

What should you do about spam at work?

I don’t know how spammers do it, but everyone I know gets spam sent to their company email address eventually. And in many cases, they are even able to make it past your company’s spam filter. Don’t put up with this by simply deleting the email. Instead, take the time to mark them as spam. This process typically will have a net effect of training the spam filter for other people while also ensuring you don’t get any more messages from the original offender.  

Step by step instructions from Google’s Support Page:  Mark or unmark spam in Gmail

Step by step instructions from Microsoft Support:  Block senders or mark emails as junk

How do you get removed from large email distributions?

In outlook, you can “Ignore” the initial message, which sends future replies to your deleted folder. In Gmail, you can choose to “Mute” the conversation. “Mute” causes all future messages in the conversation to skip your inbox and instead go straight to your archive.

Step by step instructions from Google’s Workspace Learning Center:  Mute email conversations.

Step by step instructions from Microsoft Support:  Ignore all email messages in a conversation.

How do you prevent people from emailing you multiple times for the same issue?

If the emails are happening over a short period, then the simplest way to prevent them is by responding quicker. If you can’t respond quickly, then at a minimum, be sure to email them back and set an expectation of when you will be able to respond.

Another reason this may be happening is that you are responding, but the requestor has forgotten your answer over a more extended period. You can’t stop people from forgetting or losing your emails, but you can make it easier to respond quickly. Keep a list of template answers for common questions from which you can quickly copy and paste a response. If possible, post those questions and answers somewhere that people can easily access and direct them there in your response. For even better results, consider placing a link to that document in your internal email signature.

How do you evaluate if you’ve successfully reduced the number of emails you receive?

While we are attempting to reduce the number of emails received, our real goal is to reduce the amount of time we spend reading and responding to emails. Rather than trying to track and trend email receipts over time, you’d be better served by comparing the amount of time you previously spent on email to how much time you spend now that you’ve implemented your strategy.

There are many options for time-tracking apps that can be downloaded and used on your phone. Most of them are free or cheap for an individual user, and because they’re phone apps, there’s no need to get IT approval to install them on your computer. Zapier has a good round-up on their site of the best time tracking apps for individuals:  Best time tracking apps.

Now that you’re on your way to receiving fewer emails, check out our article on how to work through all of your remaining emails:  Triaging Emails and Tasks.