send fewer emails yourself by trying to first reach the person you want to communicate with by phone or via the company chat service. for the next few weeks, try noticing when you happen to suddenly have a few minutes over, such as when standing in line or waiting for something (the plane to take off, for instance) or someone (who is always late), and try using these extra bits of time to process a few emails. try discussing a particular topic during meetings rather than via email. ask your colleagues to not cc: you regarding certain things which you know tend to spiral into a storm of replies and unnecessary back-and-forth correspondence. creating an email rule that automatically throws away emails that are practically never of any value to you and which all have a keyword in common that you let the rule look for and identify (such as the word ”Unsubscribe”). Receive fewer emails: It sounds easier said than done and I have previously written about it, but decrease the amount of email you need to process by:. So, if you are receiving so many emails that you do not have time to write to-do-task for all the emails you do not attend to immediately, then you might be able to simplify things by approaching it from one of these three angles - or why not all three a ’multiple-track attack’: Assuming that we still want to make things easier for ourselves, regardless which of the bottlenecks that is relevant in our case, we need to think of a solution. If truth be told, we are either receiving too many emails, do not have enough time to process them all, or we are not turning them into to-do-tasks fast enough. Yet again we are faced with another evening in front of the computer working overtime. Not until it is too late do we discover that we had tasks on our to-do-list which we really should have been focusing on instead and that have to be finished ”now!”. The risk is that we choose to process emails first since we are receiving so many new ones in a continuous flow, and hence forget everything written on the to-do-list. If we flag emails with red flags or mark them as unread, we will end up having two places equivalent of our to-do-list (the actual list and our email inbox) which means we have two places to look through and prioritize from when choosing tasks to do next, and hence make our lives more complicated than we ought to. No matter what we do, we still only have two hands - at least last time I checked - and can only do so much. 
So I truly understand that following this recommendation might seem like asking too much when the inflow of emails is in itself already overwhelming. This is a question I get from time to time, which is understandable since some of us receive enormous quantities of email.
Too much coming at you at onceīut what about if you receive so many emails that you do not even have time to read them all? Then there is no way you will have time to make to-do-tasks out of them, right? Suddenly we need to look through two places to get an overview - one where the tasks are clearly formulated, and another where they come in the form of ”Re: re: re: re: Crisis in the project” or something along those lines. If we choose to mark emails as unread even if we have already read them, or flag them with red flags, highlight them with yellow stars, tag them with ”To do”, or move them to a ”To do”-folder in our email account, then we create a parallell to-do-list that rivals our actual list. I always recommend people to formulate to-do-tasks for anything that we do not do immediately - even if ”it” landed in our lap via or in the form of email.
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