Break Your (Bad) Habit of Using Your Inbox as Your To-do List

We all know it: email is exhausting. The amount of time taken up by emails and its distracting nature is no secret. Studies have consistently shown workers spend about 23% of their time on email, with reports that people check their email between 11 and 36 times each hour! And there’s a common culprit for making email even less efficient: using it as a task manager. 

Email is so ubiquitous nowadays, it’s easy to forget it was designed as a replacement for good old-fashioned snail mail. It’s supposed to be a faster version of stamped letters and interdepartmental memos, not a catch-all for anything and everything work-related. It’s true that modern email has more features than the early days. But email is still first and foremost a communication tool, not a task management tool. As Entrepreneur put it, “using email as a task manager is like using a screwdriver to pound a nail. It can work, sort of, but it's the wrong tool for the job.”

Instead of leaving the inbox for email messages (what it was designed to do), lots of people mistakenly turn their inbox into a makeshift task manager. Your inbox, often messy and chaotic, is the last place you should be deciding how to spend your time. There are always new messages arriving, vying for your attention, and with each new email you read you’re jumping from one topic to the next. To effectively manage your to-do list you need clarity and focus - not the chaos of your inbox.   

Why you shouldn’t use your inbox as your to-do list

What makes email such a poor substitute for true task management? While email gives you a way to collect, categorize, and archive or delete messages, it’s missing some core features of a good task manager, including the ability to:

• Work free from distractions
• Create clear action items
• See related projects
• Rename and reorder tasks
• Prioritize work
• Schedule tasks
• See what’s been completed
• Track what’s required in order to get it done

It’s way too easy for important tasks to get buried in email. If the subject line doesn’t capture the action item it can be hard to resurface when you’re ready to tackle it later. And if an email has multiple tasks within it, that makes it doubly hard. Email doesn’t offer the flexibility to make edits when things change, or the ability to clearly plan out the steps to complete a project - especially if you need help from others to make that happen! And it definitely doesn’t give you a distraction-free environment to focus up and get things done. 

Sure, there are hacks out there to try and get email to work as a task manager. But the reality is those are subpar substitutes to a true, dedicated task management tool. Sometimes (most times!) the best way to get something done is to use the right tool for the job. 

How to get your tasks out of your inbox

If you’ve been using email as your to-do list for a while, it’s going to take some practice to make the switch and fully rely on your new task manager. Here’s a guide to help ease you out of the habit.

1. Choose a task manager and commit to using it

A dedicated task management app is the best place to take stock of everything on your plate and set your intentions for what you’ll do today. You don’t need a lot of bells and whistles to get something that works, but do consider a digital app, which is flexible and accessible everywhere, rather than a physical planner. Commit to putting all your tasks in the app, and make it your single source of truth for what you need to do.

2. Identify what’s an email and what’s a task

Your inbox is most likely filled with tasks masquerading as emails. So the next step is to understand what is a genuine email, and what is actually a task. Any message that has an action associated with it is a task (responding to the email doesn’t count!). For example, if a message is a quick question from a client that you snoozed until after a meeting, that’s a true email, and should stay in your inbox. But if the client’s question means you need to pull a report and analyze data, that’s a task. Mastering the ability to identify tasks disguised as emails is key to the next step.

3. Rescue tasks from email

Whenever you identify tasks in an email, you should extract them from the chaos. Remember, just because a task comes to your inbox doesn’t mean it should stay there! No matter what others do, you can take control by turning emails into tasks. Choosing a task management system that makes it fast and easy to capture tasks you receive via email is critical. 

That could mean forwarding the emails to your task manager or using a browser extension or Google Workspace Add-on to add the email to a task as a link or attachment. Whenever you come across an email that’s actually a task, just send it along to your task manager to address later. Don’t waste time copying and pasting or retyping the information. Just a couple of clicks to get everything in the right place! Meanwhile you can focus on responding to the emails that are true correspondence and declutter your inbox. Return to your task manager later to complete the task, delegate it, or schedule it for another time. 

4. Get your teammates on board

Ideally you want all tasks added directly to your task management system. For tasks you come up with yourself, that’s pretty easy to make happen! On the other hand, you have pretty much no control over how folks outside of your company send you tasks (hence the need for step 3). But you probably also have lots of tasks coming from your boss and teammates. So get them on board! Having everyone on the same software makes it super easy to keep you all on the same page. That way tasks are added right to the same shared system. Same goes for if you have a task to assign to someone else. Just add it right to your task manager. You don’t need email as a middleman.  

👉Pro Tip: Use a simple task manager to help aid adoption by the rest of your team. The best task manager is one that you and your teammates will actually use. So make sure it has the core features you need, ditch the distractions, and get your team onboarded faster with a straightforward tool. 

Make the switch: no more to-do lists in your inbox!

While it might be tempting to keep muddling through with your email as a task manager, it’s an inefficient and ineffective way to manage your tasks. By changing to a dedicated task management tool, you’ll gain the clarity, focus, and control to tackle your work effectively. Yes, there will be an adjustment period, as there is whenever you’re trying to change habits. But once you’re able to quickly recognize what’s a task and what’s an email, you’ll save time on both in the long run.