Email Overload

I spent 10 years at Google and Airbnb, and somewhere along the way, my inbox became a monster.

Not dramatically, not all at once. Just slowly, steadily, until one day I realized I was spending hours every day on email. Not doing real work, just processing the endless stream of messages, notifications, and newsletters that had accumulated over a decade of handing out my email address to everything with a signup form.

The worst part? I knew it was a problem, and I still couldn’t fix it. I’d declare inbox bankruptcy, start fresh, and six months later be right back in the same place.

Sound familiar?

Why This Happens

Email overload isn’t a personal failure. It’s a structural problem.

Email is free for senders. There’s no cost to sending another promotional email, another “just checking in,” another CC-all-reply chain. So everyone sends more.

Every service wants your attention. Your bank. Your apps. Your social networks. They all default to maximum email notifications because engagement metrics look better that way.

Email has no expiration date. A phone call ends. A meeting ends. An email sits in your inbox forever, silently judging you.

The CC culture. “Adding you for visibility.” “Looping in the team.” You’re now responsible for reading a 47-message thread about something that has nothing to do with you.

And the cumulative effect of all this? You open your inbox, see 200 unread messages, feel a spike of anxiety, and close it again. The emails keep piling up. The anxiety gets worse.

The Solutions That Don’t Work

“Just be more disciplined.” You can’t discipline your way out of a systemic problem. If 100 new emails arrive every day and you only have bandwidth for 50, discipline isn’t the issue.

Elaborate organization systems. Folders, labels, filters, color coding. These help you find emails, not process them. You still have to deal with every message eventually.

Declaring inbox bankruptcy. Archiving everything and starting fresh feels amazing for about a week. Then you’re right back where you started, because nothing about the underlying dynamic changed.

What Actually Works

After years of struggling with this, here’s what finally made a difference:

1. Treat your email address like your phone number

You wouldn’t give your phone number to every website you visit. Why give them your email?

Use throwaway addresses for signups you don’t care about. Use the + trick (yourname+junk@gmail.com) to filter by source. Be stingy.

2. Unsubscribe from everything

Not “most things.” Everything that doesn’t actively improve your life.

That newsletter you’ve been meaning to read “when you have time”? You won’t. That store’s promotional emails? You’ll go to their site if you want to buy something. That app’s weekly digest? Pure noise.

I wrote more about this here.

3. Turn off notifications

Your email app does not need to interrupt you. Ever.

Disable push notifications. Disable badge counts. Check email on your schedule (twice a day is enough for most people), not every time your phone buzzes.

4. Process, don’t check

When you do open your inbox, go through every email. For each one: delete it, reply to it, delegate it, or defer it to a specific time. No skipping, no “I’ll deal with this later.”

The goal is to end each session at zero, or at least close to it.

5. Use tools that actually help

Most email apps are built around displaying messages, not processing them. They make it easy to read email and hard to act on it.

This is why I built Airo Mail. AutoFile automatically archives the stuff that doesn’t need your attention (newsletters, promotions, notifications) so you only see the emails that actually matter. The inbox you open in the morning is already half-empty.

The Mindset Shift

Email overload isn’t really about email. It’s about attention.

Every email in your inbox is someone else’s agenda for your time. Some of those agendas are legitimate (your boss, your clients, your family). Most are not (marketing, notifications, CC chains).

You get to decide which ones matter. And the more ruthlessly you make that distinction, the more time you get back for the things you actually care about.

Tired of email controlling your day? Airo Mail uses AI to automatically filter the noise so you can focus on what matters.