The speed of our lives is constantly rising. And so does the speed of the communication process. Every day we receive hundreds of emails from our clients, colleagues from other departments, suppliers, etc. And sometimes such amount of new information that has to be processed by us makes us feel tired. Even if we have zero unread emails, we leave the office stressed enough thinking we could miss something.

When I started my job as a project manager, I was shocked by the number of emails I was receiving every day. At first, I was trying to answer all of them asap, but I quickly understood that I spend too much time on this. So I decided to spend 1 hour every day, from 4 PM to 5 PM, to answer the most important emails. But even if I answered only important ones, less important often remained unanswered. I was going home with an unpleasant feeling of an unfinished job. I didn’t manage to process all the requests from clients and other team members and, as a result, started to feel stressed. Also, even if I did answer all urgent emails, I was leaving the office worried that I could have missed some important email from client. 

I accidentally saw an article about “zero inbox strategy” philosophy and decided to do something with my inbox. And since I am a big fan of smart tech, I wanted to motivate myself to answer important mail with some gadgets. 

I got LaMetric smart clock for my 32nd birthday and decided to put it on my office desk. Among apps that I installed on my LaMetric TIME, was Email Notifications app. I started using it to check the number of unread emails. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it. But after a couple of weeks, I started using zero inbox theory and noticed that monitoring the number of unread emails helps me to keep my inbox empty. This helped me to reduce stress at work and stopped worrying to miss an important email from the client. 

No matter how many emails you answer during the day, having no visual proof of the finished job can cause stress. Having inbox zero at the end of the day and monitoring it makes you feel proud of yourself and motivates you to work harder.