How to get ultimate control over your inbox

Email overload isn't a discipline problem, it's a workflow problem. With the right rules, filters and automation, your inbox can be tamed

- Abhishek Baxi

The modern professional’s workday often begins and ends with the same Sisyphean task: managing an overflowing email inbox. An average office worker receives approximately 121 emails every single day—a constant stream of requests, notifications, and information demanding attention. The most insidious cost is not the time spent actively in the inbox, but the attentional cost of constant interruptions.

Most people treat email like a fire alarm—every ping follows an immediate sprint. The solution to this isn’t discipline alone but a system of rules and automations that can do the boring, repetitive work for you.

Not all emails are equal. Some arrive with a gravity of implied urgency, some loaded with social obligation, and a few have implied timelines. And, of course, a bunch of them are useless mailers. However, our instinct is to treat them equally—open everything, react to everything. Or leave all of them hanging.

Rules change the first act of email handling from decision-making to routing. When an invoice is automatically forwarded to finance, when a newsletter is parked for evening reading, and when client mail is flagged and pushed to the top, the inbox stops being a chaotic to-do list and becomes an intentional workspace.

The solution lies in moving from manual management to intelligent automation, using the tools built into every major email platform to impose order on the chaos. “Rules should help you be more effective with email management with minimal effort. The best way to learn which rules you need is to set up a new rule. Look at all available triggers and actions. This will give you ideas for creating relevant rules,” says Dr Nitin Paranjape, a productivity expert.

Email automation, in its most accessible form, is the use of predefined “rules” or “filters” to automatically perform specific actions on messages as they arrive. The concept is a simple but powerful “If This, Then That’ logic applied to your inbox.