There is nothing more stress-inducing to me than seeing the mail badge on someone's phone when it has 4, 5. I've even seen six figures like what are we doing? Just turn the badge off at that point. And the reason it's so stress-inducing to me is because I, like many solopreneurs, have I think a strange relationship with email.
Email can be a great thing. You get an email that you've signed a new client or that some money has come in. Or it could be an email from somebody that might derail your weekend. Which is why I've spent the better part of my professional career creating boundaries and systems to manage my email inbox. And that's what I want to talk about today.
Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Streamlined Solopreneur, the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off worry-free. I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's the problem.
As a solopreneur, the inbox can be a stressful, busy mess. We constantly check it because we're afraid we're going to miss something. What if a client emails me and they need me to do something right now? What if a brand emails me and tells me that I need to respond by the end of the day in order to get this brand deal? By the way, no one really means that no brand deal is worth getting anyway.
But the truth is, is that a good system in place will keep your inbox free and clear of most emails, so that when you sit down, you can focus on the most important emails. And today, I am going to share my technical system for how I'm keeping my inbox at inbox zero or as close to it as possible.
If you are struggling with the mindset stuff, I need to respond to email immediately. What happens if someone needs me? Then I would encourage you to check out Episode 520, where I talk about three steps to stop letting your inbox run your life. It's about email boundaries for solopreneurs specifically.
But this has been a long-standing system for me. It's something that I've written about for at least eight years. So this is the latest iteration. I try to improve it. How do I keep my inbox as close to inbox zero as possible? Let's get into the solution, and if you're thinking, I mean yeah, Joe, that sounds great for you, but I just can't do it. I don't know where to start. You should check out my Solopreneur Sweep over at streamlined.fm/sweep. It will walk you through the entire process for how you're spending your time, what tasks you're working on, what tools you're using, so that you can get a great picture of how you're currently running your business, so that you can improve the way you run your business and manage your inbox a little bit better.
Okay, so here's the fix.
First, you need to have a system for getting things out of your inbox and being able to process them quickly. You want to manage tasks outside your inbox. You want to send actionable items to a better place. You want to be able to screen emails, and you want to be able to manage those expectations.
So, what are some of the things that I use? Well, I think it all starts with your email tool of choice, like your email client. I use Mime Stream currently, and I do like that a lot. I often find my way back to Spark, and I really like Spark. I'm currently using Mime Stream because I like the way that Mime Stream separates. You can kind of create groups for your different email addresses. I have four email addresses: two for my personal and business email, and then two email addresses for contract work. And I like having that contract work sequestered to a different part of the app so that I can look at it only when I'm doing work for those companies.
The reason that I feel comfortable not necessarily using Spark the way I used to is because I use another service called SaneBox, and I've been using SaneBox for a long time. They sponsored my podcast many years ago, but I've been using them ever since. It is a must-have app for me. I can't stress how important SaneBox is to my workflow.
SaneBox automatically sorts my email, so only the most important messages hit my inbox. It learns based on my usage, and I can create my own folders. For example, I have one called Sane Money. They prefix all of their folders with the word sane. So I have seen money for all of my calendar invites. I have one called Sane Newsletter for any emails that I use the plus modifier for, which with plus nl. So if you don't know this, if you're using Gmail or I think Outlook, and you have your email address, let's just say mine is joe@casabona.org because that is a Google email, and this is the same thing for gmail, right? So jcasabonamail.com, you could do joe and then the plus sign and then anything after that or jcasabona and then the plus sign and then anything after that, and it'll still go to your Gmail inbox.
So for all of my newsletters, I sign up with jcasabona +NL and what that does is it signals to both Gmail and SaneBox that, oh, this is a newsletter. And then I'm going to forward it to Joe's feed reader, and that's what I'm going to talk about in a minute. But SaneBox has been great. You can also set reminders in SaneBox. If you forward an email to, let's say, 5.weeks@sanebox.com, it will surface those emails at that time. So all of that allows for quickly processing emails.
The one thing I started to talk about with the task management is yes, I used to be able to in Spark. Swipe to send an email to Todoist. I no longer do that anymore for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it would link to Spark. And so if I stopped using Spark, that task was useless. I wouldn't have any contacts. But also, Todoist's Ramble feature has expanded, at least in Beta, where now you can paste a block of text, and it will pull out the tasks for you.
So that is now my preferred method. I mean, another thing that you could do, right, is flag emails as a task somehow, maybe add a task label. Maybe if you're using SaneBox, do Sane task, and once or twice a day you can have Claude, Cowork or some other AI “agent” look through those emails and pull out tasks for you, right?
So robots have gotten a lot smarter. They understand context a lot better now. And so I don't feel like I need to wholesale just add an email to my to-do list. I can actually send the appropriate context to my to-do list.
So that's managing tasks outside of the inbox and sending actionable items to a better place, right? SaneBox is going to manage all of that for me.
The big thing for newsletters that I don't want cluttering up my inbox is I use Feedbin for my feeds. So feedbin gives you. And I've changed a bunch of times. I tried Feedly, I tried I know, Reader. I find myself coming back to Feedbin. It's the right price and it's got the best, the best feature set for me. Feedly is very bloated and again pushing those AI features, right? And I just don't want that. I don't want to pay for AI features in every software I use. So Feedbin, 5 bucks a month gives you an email address that you can subscribe to newsletters. So the reason that I do it the forward way is because I was switching services so much. And so I don't have to change my account information on any of these places where I'm subscribed or my subscription information. It's always going to be that +NL email address. And then I tell Gmail to forward anything that comes to plus NL to Feedbin right now.
And so all of my newsletters go to a feed reader. In that feed reader, I will scroll through the ones that look interesting and save those to Good Links. And so it's a kind of triple filter. I'm not looking at anything in my inbox, I'm looking at it all in a feed reader. And then I'm sending the ones I really want to read or actually take the time to read over to my reading app.
So those three tools help me manage email as it's coming in. And all of that stuff helps with fast processing. But there are a couple of other things that help me manage my inbox quickly.
One is intake forms. And so if there's a potential client or someone who wants me to be a guest on their show, if they email my inbox directly, I will usually send them to a form. And I do that because it helps me screen without having to go back and forth. I really encourage the use of forms because it does help me process those things better. Also all of my forms go to a SaneBox-trained folder so I can look at all of the forms that come in when I have created time to do that.
The other thing I will do, and I should say right, you can use whatever form builder you want here, Tally or whatever. I use Gravity Forms because all of my websites are WordPress, and I like using Gravity Forms for those forms. You can do a bunch of other routing and stuff if you want. So that is intake forms to help with requests.
The other thing that helps with requests is text expansion. So I have a bunch of email templates for if somebody wants me to do a brand deal with them, or someone wants to hire me, or whatever. And so I can just easily paste those in. I use the snippets function in Raycast right now because I think it's great. You could use,. I used TextExpander for a long time. There are a bunch of things that will help you do that.
You can even just use like the iOS or Mac OS keyboard text replacement. Right. But I like using Raycasts. It supports variables, so I can like pull in or I can put in the name of the person who emailed me, and that helps me respond to things quickly so that I can spend my time like actually responding to the things that are really, really worth responding. And usually I've been doing that with a video now. So all of this makes time for me to quickly process my inbox.
Now I kind of alluded to this, but Claude Max is, or I keep saying Claude Max because I want you to have the context that like I'm paying for the $100 a month one as an experiment, but it's really like Claude, coworker, whatever. Right. I have been toying with the idea of using Claude to do more of that. So like something that it does right now is every day at 6pm, it will go into my email and grab any emails that were from like the Gemini notetaker and grab the transcript, summarize everything, and then send any of my action items to Todoist to the Todoist inbox for me to review later.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity here. And I should be clear that it is not responding to emails for me. It is not writing emails for me. It is processing the information so that when I hit my inbox, I can respond like a human being to another human being. So I'm still toying with that. It's really experimental at this point, but I like that idea of reaching in looking for a specific set of emails. You know, this is something I was doing with help a reporter out for a while, except I was using Zapier, and so I was just like looking for particular keywords and if those keywords were in the email, send that email to a spreadsheet for me to review later. Right. I could probably do something like that. And that's the really. It's Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. It's a computer helping with computer things, talking to a computer, and grabbing the computer things from it. It's not replacing me as a human being in the process. It is crunching data, which is what AI is really great at.
The last thing I'll say here is that none of this is going to keep you out of your inbox if you feel like you need to check your email. And so it really is about managing expectations and mindset. Which is why I would strongly recommend you check out episode 520 because we tend to over-index or overestimate how much our boss may be thinking about how and when we're going to respond to email, and we think that if we don't respond immediately, we're going to lose out on opportunities when email is by definition an asynchronous communication platform.
And so I think, you know, if you're if maybe you're scared from working in tech or for a big tech company, but if you're working for yourself, you can set and manage those expectations. So definitely check out episode 520 as well if you need help with the mindset stuff.
But that's it for this episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur. That's how I keep my inbox at inbox zero. I will give you a link to a written article if you want to check out those resources. But it's really have a system for sorting your email, being able to respond to email quickly, and managing your tasks outside of your inbox, and then sending any reading material to a place where you actually read, so that you're not sifting through a bunch of email all the time.
If you are not sure where to start with this process, maybe you don't know if you have the tools to do it, or you don't know when you would get to the sorting side of things, definitely check out the solopreneur suite over at streamlined.fm/sweep.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time. I hope you find some space in your week.