Managing Email Overload at Work

“I hope this email finds you…” I hope FEWER emails find all of you. But when they (inevitably) do find you, follow 3-21-0: • 3 email processing sessions daily • 21 minutes per session • 0 emails left (goal of inbox zero) I first learned of this method from author Kevin Kruse. Today, you’ll get a proven plan to execute it. — First, why follow 3-21-0? Batching. The most successful people of the future will be those who can focus and go deep into their work. Batching email limits distraction and protects non-batching times for valuable "deep work" activities. — How to execute 3-21-0: Block 3, 21-minute sessions on your calendar. Practical times: • 9:30-9:51 AM • 1:00-1:21 PM • 4:30- 4:51 PM Avoid checking email outside these times (if possible). Kill notifications. — Your digital environment is either producing clarity or complexity. Choose clarity with the 3-21-0 Method. ⬳ Find this useful? Repost to help your network too, and follow me for more.

If you’re sending emails in bulk (>5000 emails/day), you need to know this. In a recent update, Google laid down a threshold of spam rate for bulk senders, which is less than 0.3%. This means two things: [1] You need to monitor the no. of spam complaints regularly - Spam complaints are NOT emails landing in your spam folder [2] You need to keep your spam complaints below 0.3% - Many of the companies I know have higher spam complaints First, start monitoring spam complaints by setting up Gmail Postmaster Tools for your domain. It’s a free tool by Google to check delivery errors, spam reports, domain reputation, and IP reputation. The more important question though is how to maintain spam complaint rates below 0.3%. The answer is simple - Be more relevant and valuable to users. For that, make sure to: [a] Segment your users (Use their activity, intent, and need to segment) [b] Understand what each of these segments want (Ask them questions) Send emails that are relevant to their needs. Don’t just sell but educate, entertain, and engage them [c] Bring novelty in each email. Don’t just keep sending the same sales-oriented email every day. If you don’t have any value to add, don’t send the email. There are other requirements for senders, too, like: [1] Authenticate outgoing emails by setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. DMARC may be set to p=none. [2] Enable one-click unsubscribe. And process unsubscription requests within two days. The deadline to set these up is February 1, 2024 - but they’re nudging senders to set them up already. In fact, setting these up earlier “may improve your email delivery”, the update said. For more details - read their email sender guidelines [link in comments]

I love having AI review specific types of emails I get to see if they're worth my time. Today I helped my friend Alec Cheung - a fellow marketer in the CMO Coffee Talk community I'm a member of - set up one of these AI automations and it turned out awesome, so I wanted to tell you about it (with his permission of course). Here's the backstory: Going through website form submissions was eating up too much marketing team time. The submissions (which have a place for open-ended inputs that make them hard to screen via traditional methods) flow through Pardot and trigger emails that required human review to figure out if they were genuine leads or just spam. Tons turn out to be junk, creating unnecessary work for Alec's team. Others are genuine leads (or actual paying clients) that a human definitely needs to follow up with. Alec posted in our CMO Coffee Talk AI channel a few weeks ago asking for ideas on how to improve their process with AI. This is a super simple automation, so I offered to help if he'd let me share what we did. He was in! Our fix was AI-powered automation using Zapier. Here's the flow: 1️⃣. A visitor submits a form on Alec's company's website. 2️⃣. Pardot sends an email with the form contents to a designated address. 3️⃣. Zapier kicks off the automation. 4️⃣. GPT-4o reads, analyzes, and categorizes the submission. 5️⃣. Based on the categorization, the automation filters the next steps. 6️⃣. If a human needs to attend to the email, it emails them (along with the appropriate categorization, directly in the flag email's subject line). If it does not require a human, then nobody is notified about the form submission. The result is a far more streamlined workflow that will save a lot of monotonous manual effort. And it's CHEAP. It looks like this automation will cost Alec around $0.10-$0.20 per day in AI usage to run - yes, cents, not dollars. It's an incredibly affordable solution for such a big time (and headache)-saver. Alec was new to using Zapier for this kind of task, so we had 2 calls. First, we planned the planned process, and I gave him some homework, and then today we finished everything. (And he gave me the okay to share with you!) While the setup is pretty straightforward, it does require a base knowledge of Zapier, and how to write solid AI prompts (this isn't something for AI newbies to take on alone). For those in CMO Coffee Talk, I'll go much deeper into this automation during our 2/19 mid-week Zoom "What Every CMO Needs to Know About How AI is Evolving in 2025: Automated Workflows, Agents, and Reasoning Models." Also - if you're a marketer and want to explore AI automations, I do get into that in my Foundations of Generative AI for B2B Marketing course (🔗 in bio). --- UPDATE: A recording of the webinar for CMOs I mentioned above is now available! More details at: https://lnkd.in/gxe9EQ69

Last week I almost sent an email I'd regret by lunch. Someone questioned a decision I'd put real thought into, and my first draft was sharp — defensive, a little petty (I'll own that), the kind of email that feels great to write and terrible to have sent. I had my finger over send. Then I closed the laptop and walked away for ten minutes. Those ten minutes were the whole thing. Not the decision I was defending. Not even the criticism itself. Just — what I did in that gap. Here's what I've come to believe: "Maturity isn't having fewer reactions. It's having a longer hallway between the trigger and the door — and refusing to sprint down it." Your reaction is fast, automatic, mostly inherited. The flinch. The defensive sentence forming while someone's still talking. The reply that feels justified at 9am and embarrassing by noon. Your response is what you choose after. And that gap — that drawn breath, that "let me come back to you on this" — is the only part of your behavior that's actually yours. Everything else is reflex wearing your name tag. I've started practicing this in the small, low-stakes moments, because that's where the cost of getting it wrong is basically zero: ➤ Catch it. The second you feel the flinch — a curt message, a meeting that's gone sideways, feedback that stings — name it silently: "That's my reaction." Naming it is what breaks the loop. ➤ Buy time. Ten seconds before you do anything. For anything written, the rule is even simpler: draft it, don't send it. Come back in an hour. ➤ Choose the response. Ask one question — "What do I want to be true about how I handled this a week from now?" Then act from that answer, not from the heat of the moment. I almost sent that email. I'm glad I didn't — not because what I wrote was wrong, but because it wasn't mine. It was my reaction wearing my name. The gap is a muscle. Most people just never go to the gym. What's a moment where you caught yourself in that gap — and what did you do with it? #Leadership #ExecutiveCoaching #EmotionalIntelligence

Most outreach fails at sentence one. Not because recruiters are bad writers. Because they're answering the wrong question. The candidate isn't asking "what's the role?" They're asking "why me, why this, why now?" Your open rates are probably fine. 70%, 80%, even higher. Candidates are seeing your emails. They're reading sentence one. And they're deciding you're not worth 30 seconds. That gap between opens and replies is where outreach dies. The fix is three variables. Miss one and you're noise: 1. "Why you" is not flattery. "I saw your profile and thought you'd be a great fit" gets deleted. "You scaled Stripe's data team from 4 to 40 and this role needs exactly that playbook" gets a reply. Specificity is respect. Vagueness is spam. 2. "Why this" is not a job description. Nobody opens an email hoping for bullet points. They want the story: your VP of Eng just left Google to build this team from scratch and she's interviewing her own direct reports. That's "why this." Requirements are what. Story is why. 3. "Why now" is the one most recruiters skip. And it's the difference between "interesting" and "I need to respond today." The hiring manager blocked four hours next week for finals. The comp band just got approved 15% higher. The team is bringing two great candidates on-site next week, and things could move fast. Company events don't create urgency. Candidate implications do. The full sequence: Touch one: all three variables, under 100 words (entire message <450 words). Touch two: proof (a team win, a case study, a relevant link). Touch three: something appealing to culture/values/impact (blog posts are great!), personalized to the role. Touch four: the breakup email. That breakup email is a respect signal. It says you value their time enough to stop. "Just circling back" tells candidates you have nothing new. "Here's what changed since Tuesday" tells them their attention is worth earning.

For every 1,000 cold messages sent, only a handful receive a response. The remaining messages consume time, effort, software costs, and sales energy without creating meaningful business opportunities. The problem isn't that outbound sales no longer works. The problem is that many teams still focus on volume instead of relevance. A prospect who has never visited your website, engaged with your content, searched for your solution Or shown any buying signals is unlikely to respond just because they received another generic message. People ignore messages that feel like they were written for everyone. Today's buyers expect something different. They want communication that reflects an understanding of their business, their challenges, and the timing of their needs. Personalization is no longer an extra effort (it is the minimum expectation.) The highest-performing sales professionals rarely rely on mass outreach alone. They spend more time identifying buyers who are already showing intent. They study customer behavior, research accounts, understand industry changes, and craft messages that answer a real business problem instead of introducing another sales pitch. Instead of asking, "How many emails did we send today?" Ask, "How many conversations did we start with people who actually needed our solution?"

I know how easy it is to feel overwhelmed by the constant flow of communication. I’ve built several practical systems using AI that dramatically improve how I manage information without drowning in it as a CEO. Here’s what works for me: 📥 Make your way to inbox zero. Reaching inbox zero is essential for my mental clarity. With a clear inbox, I find myself more present and receptive to new ideas. But it’s a lot easier said than done! Measuring my progress works really well for me. I track my inbox zero status using a Gmail integration in Coda, which creates a progress tracker inspired by Wordle that gives me an immediate visualization. You can create your own tracker here and check out some of the rituals that help me maintain inbox zero: https://lnkd.in/g5j6ppni. 📑 Turn meeting notes into action drivers. My top tip is to use AI to auto-draft summaries for each audience, get a concrete list of actions, and then send personalized recaps to attendees. This is super helpful and ensures my meeting notes actually serve a purpose instead of just going into a filing cabinet, never to be surfaced again. 📤 Set up forwardable notes as an alley-oop for your team. I have a solid structure in place that helps me reach customers, partners, and candidates my team wants to connect with. It’s a pretty simple idea: instead of writing a note that I will send, write a note to me, and I will forward the email after adding a small personal addition. And an important note is that for this to be effective, the notes should be brief and clearly articulate the ask and all details. Those processes for inbound, outbound, and in-person communications work for me today, but I’m constantly refining them and exploring new tools that might make them even better.

Executive: “My inbox is out of control.” Assistant: “Say less. I’ve got a plan.” If your executive’s inbox looks like a digital black hole of unread messages, never-ending CCs, and urgent requests buried under newsletter subscriptions, you’re not alone. But if you are working with a strategic lens, you’re not just here to “check emails.” You’re here to build a system that makes their inbox WORK FOR THEM. So, when an executive drops the “My inbox is a mess” bomb, here’s how a next-level assistant responds: Step 1: Set the Rules of Engagement Before touching a single email, ask: ➡️ What actually requires your eyes, and what can I handle? ➡️ Who are your VIPs, and who gets a same-day response no matter what? ➡️ What’s your preferred communication style—daily summaries, flagging urgent emails, or handling 80% of it so you only see the top 20%? If they don’t have clear answers, guess what? You create the system for them. Step 2: Automate, Filter, and Declutter The goal? Inbox Zen. ✅ Set up VIP folders. So high-priority emails don’t drown in the noise. ✅ Use rules & filters. Newsletters, FYIs, and non-urgent emails? Sorted automatically. ✅ Create canned responses. If they’re constantly typing the same replies, save that time! Step 3: Control the Chaos with an Inbox Routine No more inbox panic at 4 PM. Put a system in place: 🔹 Morning: Quick scan for what’s urgent? What can be delegated? 🔹 Midday: Check-in for any new priorities? 🔹 End of day: Review unanswered emails, summarize key items, prep for tomorrow. Step 4: Train Your Executive to Trust the Process Your exec needs to know: If you’re managing the inbox, they don’t have to. Show them the system works by keeping them focused on what actually matters. Over time, they’ll stop drowning in emails and you become the secret weapon behind their inbox sanity. Remember, you’re protecting their time, ensuring priorities don’t get lost, and making sure their inbox serves them and not the other way around. I want to hear it. Drop your best tips below for taming a wild inbox! 👇🏽 #evolvedassistant #administrativeassistant #executivesupport #administrativeprofessional #executiveassistant

We helped one of our clients generate over 6200 leads and $1.74M in CLOSED revenue this last year, here’s what we’ve learned: These are a healthy mix of core principles that are good reminders + some less common insights: 🔹Other working cold channels = cold email will probably work: I wasn’t sold on the value prop initially despite our POC being bullish on it. That said, they had well documented playbooks for cold calls, FB ads, even D2D sales that we adapted to email copy. The result was one of the best performing campaigns we have ever run & continue to run. To this day, the copywriting remains relatively unchanged from the first day we launched it despite numerous tests to improve it. 🔹Don’t neglect personal emails: Most of the revenue for this client comes for emails that end in @gmail, @outlook, etc. Sending to these emails can be a bit tricky but often gives you direct access to the owner. Instantly.ai has been the best platform we tested for deliverability to those email types and is one of the big reasons we use them for all of our clients. 🔹Local business data is messy: We had a lot of false positives in the beginning, I saw an email for Build-a-bear make its way into a list of ‘Roofers’. A lot of secondary filtering is required to have accurate data. If you are using google maps scrapers or even most databases it’s always valuable to run your own filtering. 🔹Build clean attribution as soon as you see traction: The reason why we know exactly how much money our client has made from our outreach is because we did this early on. Once positive replies are coming in, track leads all the way to end of the sales cycle. Doing so allows you to visualize bottlenecks & recognize patterns that can feed back into the email outreach. 🔹Scale itself is an inherent challenge: Everytime we increase the sending volume, something needs to be improved. Problems don’t scale linearly and as you start to increase volume you'll see where the bottlenecks in the system are. This is another reason why clean attribution is so important - never make decisions based on a ‘feeling’. Launching or maintaining a GTM motion is stressful and it’s very easy to make poor decisions that are emotionally guided if you don’t have data to ground you in reality. 🔹Agency specific** The client ‘isn’t always right’: This client makes over 100 million dollars a year, so many times when they made suggestions we would assume they were right even if we had conflicting evidence. This can happen a lot if you're not careful. Every single one of our clients makes at least 10x our revenue & it can be easy to believe that because of that, their opinions matter more.     Over time we’ve realized in many cases being overly flexible does more harm than good and having conviction in your proven process will avoid unnecessary detours or at the very least facilitate more productive discussions. If you've ran profitable cold email campaigns, any big takeaways you've had?