Happy Monday 🌞
Ten years ago, my email was added to Buffer’s website when I joined the team. My personal email has been around for about 20 years. You can imagine it’s not hard to find — and it’s probably been sold more times than I’d like to think about. With all of that, there’s almost always something in my inbox.
If you joined recently, hi 👋 I’m Hailley. I’ve always created systems for my work (as a Marketing leader at Buffer) and for my life (as a remote worker and mom of two) to stay productive, calm, and organized.
Today is a bit different; I don’t really have an email system (at least, not one that works). I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’m sharing where I am at and hoping to get some advice.
There is no perfect email system → there's just time
I’ve come to believe there isn’t a perfect email system; there is just the amount of time you have to invest in email at any given point.
The best framing I’ve ever heard for email came from someone who compared it to household chores. Email is like dishes and laundry — it’s just a constant. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t care about your system.
My father-in-law, who’s in his 70s, has one of my favorite approaches: he reads and replies throughout the week, but Fridays are the day he deletes email. Like a virtual garbage truck coming by on schedule, he lets it accumulate and then has a weekly ritual to clear it out. I find this weekly routine very endearing.
There’s no universally correct way to handle email. There’s just how much time and energy you have to give it in a given season of life.
The two camps I keep cycling between
When I’m honest with myself, I tend to bounce between two approaches:
- Stay on top of it. I dedicate time to replying and deleting almost daily, keeping things reasonably clear.
- Let it build, then purge. I keep an eye out for anything urgent, otherwise let it accumulate — until one day (weeks, maybe months later) I have the time and motivation to clear the whole thing and promise I’ll never let it get that bad again.
There’s a third camp I’ve never been able to join: just let it pile up indefinitely and not care. That state would likely cause me too much additional stress, so it’s not an option for me.
I know some people manage inbox chaos by focusing only on unread messages and ignoring the rest. That sounds like the wild west to me. But I also know it works for them, and that’s sort of the point. There’s not one way to do email.
Note: When I went on maternity leave and sabbatical, my solution was just to delete my work emails and auto-reply asking people to reach back out when I was online (it worked).
The real culprits
Part of what makes email feel unmanageable isn’t just volume — it’s the composition of what’s in there. For me it breaks down into a few categories: newsletters I love reading, marketing emails I’ve accumulated over years (do unsubscribe buttons even work anymore?), cold outreach that comes with being a person on the internet who writes and collaborates publicly, and genuinely important stuff — emails from my kids’ schools, messages from friends and connections — that I can’t let get buried.
I’ve gone through multiple rounds of unsubscribe tools over the years. There are more sophisticated tools out there for managing this kind of volume, but they tend to be expensive. What I’m more optimistic about lately is using AI to help, whether that’s drafting replies faster, summarizing long threads, or triaging what actually needs attention. It’s not a magic fix, but it’s a start I’m hoping to build on.
What I’ve settled on
I check email most days, and I delete ruthlessly when I can. I try not to feel like I have to respond to everything, which took me longer to accept than I’d like to admit.
It’s not a perfect system. There are weeks where I’m on top of it and weeks where I’m not. But I’ve stopped expecting email to ever feel like something I’m on top of — and that mindset shift has helped more than any tool or filter I’ve tried.
Email isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a constant to be managed. And the best system is probably the one that fits your life right now, even if it looks completely different in six months.
I’d love to hear how you handle email — are you a daily archiver, a weekly deleter, or something else entirely? Have you figured out a magic system to share with the rest of us? Reply and let me know!
See you next week,
Hailley
P.S.: I’ve built out several templates based on the last few newsletters. If you missed them, here’s the main page for my Notion templates.
“Opportunities are grains of sand. They slide right past drooping fingers, but an active palm can gather whatever is within reach and shape it into a little castle. It is the act of engaging with the material that gives it shape.” - James Clear
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