In today's fast-paced world, email management is a critical skill, but for those with ADHD,  constantly checking email can become an addictive habit and the source of our greatest distraction.

Email acts as a digital slot machine for those with ADHD, creating a dopamine-driven cycle of constant checking in search of novelty and stimulation. 

This behavior is about immediate gratification and coping with executive function challenges like task initiation and priority setting. By understanding how your brain responds to these stimuli, you can begin to develop more intentional habits.

The cost of this unconscious compulsion is a lot higher than you realize because compulsive email checking acts as a crutch for avoiding more significant tasks. The perceived productivity of responding to emails is misleading and can detract from meaningful work.

The worst part?  Email-induced task-switching destroys focus. It takes up to 23 minutes for neurotypical brains to refocus after a switch, and for ADHD brains, it’s even longer. 

A key takeaway from the episode is that being constantly available via email is often unnecessary and can be counterproductive. Setting specific email hours can actually enhance client perceptions of professionalism.

Shared in this Episode: 

Dedicated Email Blocks 

Start by setting two defined email blocks per day. This limits distractions and prevents email from dictating your schedule. Use autoresponders to set client expectations and provide alternative contact methods for emergencies.

The 3-Folders System

Simplify your inbox with three primary folders — “Action Required,” “Waiting For,” and “Archive.” This method streamlines email management, reducing the clutter and stress of a crowded inbox.

Leveraging Email Templates:

Create templates for routine responses. This reduces cognitive load and enhances efficiency. Customize these for common client questions, project updates, and scheduling queries.

Ultimately, email management is not merely about efficiency but about owning your worth as an entrepreneur. Running a business should offer freedom, not bind you to other people's priorities.

By fostering better boundaries, entrepreneurs can build better work habits, which in turn boosts confidence and productivity. It's essential to remember that you are not always at others' beck and call.

Your time and attention are invaluable, so it’s time to let your inbox serve you, not the other way around.

Mentioned in this episode:

TidyCal - the online calendar that prevents me from overscheduling & sends reminders to my clients so I don’t have to 

Now What?  

Ready to start dealing with your Inbox? Be sure to grab my free worksheet that combines all the strategies shared in this episode.

It’s a simple to implement, step by step approach that will begin to free up time and attention for what matters most, which is not going to be found in your Inbox. Click here to get your copy.  

© 2024 ADHD-ish Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops  / Outro music by Vladimir /  Bobi Music / All rights reserved. 

Hey, boss. If you're anything like me or my clients, you probably checked your email before doing anything else this morning. You might even have your inbox open right now, anticipating the arrival of yet another message. Now I know that your inbox feels both urgent and important, but actually, it's a checklist of other people's priorities and one of your greatest distractions. So today, we're going to explore why we struggle so damn much with email management, why it's especially challenging for entrepreneurs with ADHD, and most importantly, what we can do about it. Whether you're drowning in thousands of unread emails or you're caught in an endless cycle of checking every five minutes, this episode has got something for you. I'm gonna be sharing some stories from other entrepreneurs who face these challenges and explore solutions that actually work with our ADHD brain. By the end of this short episode, you're gonna understand why email management feels so hard and have practical strategies that I promise will make it easier.

Now, let's start by talking about why email is basically like crack or candy if you prefer for our ADHD brain. Every time you check that inbox, you're basically playing a slot machine of sorts. Will there be an exciting new opportunity? Will I get a message from my favorite client? Am I gonna be offered a special surprise? This uncertainty creates a dopamine response. And dopamine is the same brain chemical that we often struggle to regulate with ADHD. Here's what's happening, your brain is seeking novelty and stimulation, an email provides an endless and almost instantaneous stream of it. Each new message is a potential source of excitement or interest. And your brain doesn't know the difference between an email that thrills you and an email that triggers you because you're getting a response in your brain, this is why you do it.

You might find yourself unconsciously checking your email when you're getting a little tired or a little bored with a specific task, or why you might open your inbox without even realizing you're doing it. One of my clients, Sarah, had a very frequent email checking behavior, but she didn't really realize how much until I asked her to monitor it for just a single day. Just literally, she was just doing hash marks on a piece of paper on her desk. She was absolutely shocked to discover that she had checked her inbox 87 times, roughly every ten minutes during her entire workday. And that doesn't even include all the times she checked before her workday officially began and all the ones after. Now she would say, but I need to, and had some very convincing talking points. But actually, it brings us to our next point, and this may be uncomfortable.

Many of us have convinced ourselves that being constantly available by email is not only good practice, it's what our clients expect. We tell ourselves and others, but my clients need to be able to reach me at any time. Or in my industry, quick response times are critical. But let's dig a little deeper. When I'm working with entrepreneurs with ADHD, what we will often discover when we're willing to face the discomfort and do a little digging, is that compulsive email checking is actually serving as a coping mechanism and let me tell you why. First, responding to something gives us direction.

I mean, let's face it, every time you wander into your inbox or go there deliberately, someone else's message is there telling you exactly what to do. What they need, what they want, what they expect, what they're waiting for. So you don't have to think about what's your priority, what's important for you to do. And because our executive functions are often struggling in the area of setting priorities and task initiation, going to your inbox is like plucking the low hanging fruit, it requires a lot less executive function. Makes sense, right? But here's the thing, I want you to think of your inbox not as a treasure box full of goodies, but basically a checklist of OPPs, other people's priorities, combined with the children's game of Tag You're It.

Because once you've acknowledged that email or even opened it, now it's your problem because they've literally passed the baton. The other reason so many of us default to checking our emails constantly is that it provides immediate feedback. You send a response, you get a thank you. Instant gratification for our dopamine seeking brains. Let me share a quick story about my client, Mike. Mike has been running a very successful marketing agency for over a decade and has always prided himself on quick response to emails. I think he told me he tries to go for fifteen minutes on average, which means half of them are faster. That was a point of pride for Mike that his clients could reach him and get a quick response by email basically any time of the day. He was reluctant to tell me this at first, but he also did this on the weekends.

Now, during our work together, he got to a point where he realized something that was quite profound for him. This constant email availability was sort of a false sense of pride, but was actually serving to help him avoid the deeper, more challenging work of some significant changes he needed to make in his business. He felt productive, after all he was always working, but what he was doing was responding to other people's priorities, instead of setting and following through on his own, ooof. This is a really common occurrence among entrepreneurs with ADHD because, let's be honest, setting and maintaining our own priorities requires a lot of executive function that most of the time we don't feel we have.

It's just so much easier to let our inbox dictate our day than create and stick to our own schedule, and focus on our own goals. Now, let's talk about why email management isn't just challenging. It actually creates a perfect storm of ADHD difficulties. Time blindness. This is why I'm just gonna check my email real quick. Turns into a two hour journey through your inbox. Because our brains struggle to accurately estimate how long things will take and how much time we're actually spending. And email is so freaking deceptive because each individual email could be a quick response or turn into a big ass project. Then there's task switching, every time you check your email, you're not just taking a quick break.

You're asking your brain to completely switch contexts. And research shows this is especially challenging for ADHD brains. It's like you're constantly changing lanes in heavy traffic. Each time you do, it takes more energy and increases risk. Then there's your working memory limitations. These are the ones that I'm most troubled by. I mean, we know we have trouble remembering things. So what do we do with email? We keep freaking checking because we know we forget and we think if we just keep checking, we're not going to forget.

You know what's ironic? This constant checking actually makes it harder to remember and to focus on our most important tasks. We are literally slicing and dicing up our attention span under the guise of I don't wanna forget, I don't wanna forget, I wanna forget. Meanwhile, we're whittling away at our own working memory. Let's explore now the hidden costs of our email habits because, of course, I'm being a little bit dramatic. I mean, that's your girl. But there is a true cost, and I don't think you realize how much you're paying. It's true for our business and for our well-being, because we just don't realize how much these behaviors are actually affecting us. And like I always say, all behavior is habit forming.

And this kind of habit with the intermittent reinforcement and the quick dopamine hit is very habit forming. But I want you to think about your executive functioning like this. Think of it like a phone battery. Every time you switch from whatever you're doing to check-in your inbox, you're basically making your brain run multiple apps at once. Task switching, decision making, communication, and prioritization. So for ADHD brains, these functions are already more energy intensive. One of my clients says it this way, by 2PM, I feel like I've run a marathon, but when I look at my most important stuff, I've barely moved forward. I'm exhausted from just managing my inbox.

I hope you don't have to get to that point to be ready to learn some simple tools, but sometimes we do. But here's a startling fact that I hope will incentivize you getting there sooner. It takes an average person, AKA neurotypical, twenty three minutes to fully regain their focus after a task switch. For ADHD brains, the cost is usually higher. So let's do some quick math. Let's say you're checking your email 10 times during your workday, which is probably very typical. That means, potentially, two hundred and thirty minutes or almost four hours are spent trying to regain your full focus, woah.

So email essentially creates the busy treadmill. You're moving all day, you're responding to messages. You're putting out fires, but at the end of the day, you don't have a whole lot to show for yourself, and you haven't moved forward on what matters most, and that feels shitty. Now here's something counterintuitive. You know, so many of us think we need to be available at all times because that's what our clients expect, and that's how we maintain a competitive advantage, and blah blah blah blah blah. But guess what, there's such a thing as being too available. And when you are, you can actually damage your client relationships.

One of my clients is a marketing strategist and was terrified to set any kind of boundaries with email because she was absolutely convinced with no evidence that her clients would push back, they would protest, and some of them might even fire her. When she finally got to the point where she was literally losing her mind how inefficient her days had become, she agreed to set up specific email hours. And when she did, something unexpected happened. Well, at least she didn't expect it. Her clients actually started treating her with more respect and actually perceived her as more professional. Think about it, when someone's always available, like, anytime, instantly on demand, do you value them more or less? If you're like most people, you take people like that for granted.

You don't make them a priority because they're always available. Think about it, if you had the opportunity to hire a consultant for something you really needed in your business, and you had two choices, one who said, I can meet today, when's a good time? Versus the other who's booked out for two months, which one do you automatically perceive as being more valuable? Now we're at that point in the episode that I hope you have been sufficiently convinced that it's a good time to get a handle on your inbox. Even if it's not totally out of control, it's going to help free you up for more of what matters most.

So let's explore some very ADHD friendly solutions that are so simple, you'll wonder why you haven't done them already. No shame. You can begin today, and you could start small and build up to a more comprehensive system if you need to, you might not. So here's how I recommend you start. Instead of checking email all day on an unlimited basis, try setting two dedicated email blocks. I recommend one in the late morning and one in the mid-afternoon. Now I know what you're thinking, but what if I miss something urgent? K, we're gonna address that. But first, remember, your most important work truly deserves your best attention, not your attention leftovers.

Two, it shows that you respect your own time and work boundaries, which automatically makes people respect you more. And three, it provides an alternative for genuine emergencies because genuine emergencies actually occur. Now some people are entitled, and some people are impatient, and some people think they don't need to follow the rules. So you will have some boundary breachers who fully expect to be able to reach you whenever they want. So there's a little bit of follow-up here. You may need to have some uncomfortable conversations with people. But 90% of the people that you've trained to think that you're available on demand will respond to this in a very respectful way. I doubted it myself, but when I implemented it, it was really true.

And guess what? It doesn't have to be perfect. None of this has to be perfect, even though your brain may tell you. It's like a messy kitchen. It just needs to be organized enough that you can cook and find what you need. Nobody's kitchen needs to be an Instagram worthy image because that's not sustainable. For ADHD brains, simple is always better. So once you've created your two times and your autoresponder, your next simple step is this, three folders, three primary folders. Action required, waiting for, and archive. What goes in each of them?

Action required is for the emails that you need to handle this week, not this minute, this week. Waiting for is the folder where you put the emails where you're waiting on some information from another party so that you can respond. And archive is everything else, that's it. No complex color coding, no nested folder systems, because you know you're gonna abandon that shit in a week. Save your brain, and save your brain power for unique responses, but create templates for everything else. Some of the things that you can create templates for will save you so much time and energy. Some examples, common client questions.

If you've asked answered a question once, you're probably gonna be answering it again and again and again, create a freaking template. You can always customize it, but crafting a original response from scratch for common questions is a colossal waste of time and energy, masquerading as being important. You can also create templates for project status updates. Lots of times we don't reach out and give people updates because we think we should be further or it's kind of like, well, I haven't heard from them, so no news is good news. People get pissy when they don't hear from you. People expect to get regular updates on projects. But if you struggle, what do I say if we haven't really gotten that much done? Or what if what do I say if we're having supply chain delays and we're not making progress? Or what do I say? Create a template.

Create a template, baby. Then you do not have to come up with some original, you know, genius response on the spot. Create a template, two more suggestions for templates. Scheduling meetings, if for some strange reason, I can't imagine why, you don't have an online scheduler, I recommend them highly. Create a simple template for meeting scheduling. And if you do much back and forth trying to pin down meeting times with someone that's not in your office or part of your organization, for the love of God, get an online scheduler.

I recently switched to TidyCal. I think it's the deal is still available in AppSumo where you can literally pay one time for life so I'll link to that in the show notes. Now once you've got your two times a day free email, you've got your folders, you've got your autoresponders, you've got your templates. And I know it sounds like it's a lot, but it is so little. You could literally set all of this up or better yet have your assistant set it up so fast. Here's the point when everything really changes. Because it's like we have to experience this to really believe it.

But when you start freeing up some time and energy and focus and attention, and you actually begin to experience the reality that being less available actually makes you more valuable, everything changes. This is not just about email management, my friend. It's about owning your worth as a business owner. Because most of us started a business to have more freedom, not to be chained to our inbox. And breaking free also requires that you understand some fundamental truths. In spite of what you may believe or what you've been told or what you think the industry standard is, being responsive does not mean giving people unlimited access to you at all times on demand. I, for one, would much prefer getting a quality response at a predictable time than a rushed response at a random time, because I know they're just freaking squeezing me in with a bunch of other people.

When you're not constantly monitoring your email, you have a little more space in your mind and brain to give a thoughtful, focused response during your designated time. Because during those two designated times, you're not doing anything else. Some people need to set aside thirty minutes in the late morning, in the middle of the afternoon. Some people need an hour each time. It all depends on your business. But focused time where you're only doing one thing is always going to be more effective and more efficient. You wanna know what else? As your confidence in actually focusing on your own priorities begins to grow, you're gonna get less of a thrill from your constant email validation. It's a little bit addictive right? Every time we check an email and respond, it creates like this I'm important and I'm necessary and I'm helping people kind of loop but it's low quality stuff.

As you carve out time to focus on what really matters, you're not gonna get as big a thrill from emptying out your inbox. And this creates a positive spiral because guess what? Better boundaries leads to better work. Better work builds more confidence. Better confidence makes maintaining boundaries easier. And let's be honest, not checking constantly when that's what you're used to doing means you're gonna be facing FOMO and a worry that you're letting people down and this is real. This is real. And for many people, it is very painful but here's the thing. Make sure you are not projecting your rejection sensitivity onto others by assuming that if you don't respond to them immediately, that they're gonna feel rejected or disrespected. 99% of the time, it simply isn't true.

So, here's a progressive approach to managing it, weaning yourself off of the constant checking, because you just may not be able to go cold turkey. For some of you, only checking twice a day at designated periods is gonna feel like you need to go to rehab for email withdrawal. So do it this way, start with defined email times and maybe instead of two times a day, maybe it's four. As long as it's, like, a lot less than what you're doing now. And allow yourself emergency checks if your anxiety is out of control. Do this also, track what constitutes a genuine emergency, like a genuine email emergency.

Spoiler alert, it's probably less than 1% of emails. And then use this data to adjust your system and reassure your anxious brain. So that over time when you realize, oh, I used to check my email every five minutes around the clock, now I'm checking at predictable intervals four times a day. And as it turns out, only about 1% of my emails are actual emergencies. That should reassure you enough, until your anxiety just simmer down enough, to then cut back to three times a day. And then two, you can do a progressive approach. You can do like a gradual weaning. Whatever works for you, boo, that's what you should do.

But remember, you went out on your own to support your life by being self employed, not to be permanently tethered to your inbox. And each time that you resist checking your email, you're strengthening that muscle. You're strengthening your ability to focus on what matters most, and you're becoming more resilient in the process. Just remember to start small. You don't have to do everything I've talked about today. Start with one change, just one and build over time. Maybe it's the autoresponder. Or maybe instead of having two blocks, if that feels too drastic for you, then commit to one sacred hour of deep work with no email checking. It's gonna be a game changer, I promise you.

Pay attention to how it feels to reclaim some sense of control over your time and your attention. Your inbox is a tool, my friend. It is just a tool and it is a tool that is meant to serve you and your business, not become the task master that runs your life. You can maintain excellent client relationships, grow your business, and manage your ADHD challenges without being a slave to your inbox. Because at the end of the day, your time and attention are your most valuable assets. Taming your inbox is one of the best ways I know to protect them. Now, because learning is good, but implementation is better, I've put together a checklist to help you remember everything I've talked about in this episode and how to implement it. And the link to grab your copy is located, you guessed it, in the show notes.