Solving My Email Problem
My inbox is at 0 and other than gmail&#x27;s auto-filtering tabs I don&#x27;t have too much extra filtering going on (most of it is related to Google Alerts).<p>For the last 20 years my rule has been &quot;If I check my email and inbox &gt; 1 then deal with the email right now&quot;. I usually check my email every few hours.<p>I&#x27;m not Mr. popular, but I&#x27;m also not anonymous. I do personal support for 30,000+ people who have taken one of my online courses so I get a fair amount of email and other things. I tend to write massive responses from scratch for a lot of them as well.<p>The key is not to let it build up. Then you&#x27;ll have 99 problems but email won&#x27;t be one of them.<p>Also I&#x27;m not sure if this is related but I&#x27;m one of those people who think it&#x27;s unthinkably rude to ignore someone. I would never in a million years read an email and not respond to it (unless it clearly wasn&#x27;t meant to be responded to). Likewise, if I see a &gt; 1 inbox I feel compelled to handle it ASAP because I don&#x27;t want to keep that person waiting.<p>(Of course there&#x27;s exceptions, like I&#x27;m not responding to pure spam, but I do get about 50 emails a week where people ask to post a guest post on my blog and I always manually respond nicely to them with a &quot;no thanks but good luck&quot; type of message along with some context around their niche).