15 Ways You Can Have a Healthy Relationship with Emails

Irtiza Hafiz
9 min readSep 16, 2022
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Emails have become an essential part of both our professional and personal lives.

We spend a lot of time inside our inboxes. A lot of times this can give us a false sense of being productive. Just by flipping through our emails, we might think that we are being productive. In reality, that’s not always the case.

It’s an easy trap to fall into. It takes very minimal effort.

Depending on the state of your inbox, it can also be a huge time sink. For most of us, we are very far from inbox zero. Odds are, as you are reading this post, you have an inbox full of unnecessary emails waiting for you.

Whenever you go into the app next, you will start scrolling through these, and before you know it hours would have passed. You will think that you achieved something. But in reality, more often than not, you will have achieved very little.

I have always struggled with this since I started working full-time in 2019. My email inbox has been a mess! It was overwhelming and a huge time-sink. Due to the sheer size of the inbox, a lot of important emails also slipped through the cracks.

I needed a change of systems. That’s when I started coming up with ideas to streamline my email workflow and come up with a sustainable and optimal system.

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Irtiza Hafiz

Engineering manager who writes about software development and productivity https://irtizahafiz.com