8 Tips to Stop Email Overwhelm

With copy-and-paste scripts you can borrow

Does your inbox feel like a never-ending to-do list?

Digital overwhelm - such as relentless emails and phone buzzes -is a key ingredient in technostress. An issue that is now being clearly linked with burnout.

One recent study* in a German hospital, for example, found that techno-overload and techno-complexity were significant contributors to burnout in nurses.

I’ve collected ideas and strategies from colleagues, clients, and my own experiments so that I can share these eight practical strategies to help protect your nervous system digital overload and stop the email overwhelm. Each tip includes a script or tweak you can try right away.

1. Set Boundaries for CCs

Why: Being copied into endless email threads eats away at your attention and clarity. This kind of “techno-invasion” creates overload and ambiguity. When you’re CC’d with no clear ask, your brain stays semi-alert, scanning for what you might be responsible for.

Try this: Set a rule that diverts all CC’d messages to a separate folder that you review once daily or weekly.

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How to make it stick: Let your close team know. It may take a few reminders for the habit to land — but it will land.

2. Return from Leave to an Empty Inbox

Why: Many of us dread the email mountain post-holiday - which tempts us to keep checking while we’re away. But this erodes recovery from work-related stress. Psychological detachment from work is essential in preventing long-term burnout.

Out-of-Office Script:

How to embed it: If your workplace has a staff wellbeing policy around email, reference it:

One of my clients (shared with her permission) tried this recently - deleting all incoming messages she'd received whilst on leave then asking senders to resend anything still relevant after her return if they asked her why she hadn't replied. This was hard on that first occasion but on the follow up holiday? She only had two emails waiting! Boundaries work, but only if you stick to your guns, reinforce and the don't expect instant payoff.

3. Use a ‘Deep Focus Day’ Auto-Reply

Why: We lose around 23 minutes** of focus after every interruption. Deep work like writing, planning and strategising, depends on uninterrupted attention.

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Make it work: Block it in your calendar and tell your team. Try it once a month - you can always scale up. I used this while writing my burnout book, and it made a huge difference to my ability to concentrate.

4. Use AI to Summarise Long Email Threads

Why: Tracking back through winding chains is exhausting. This is exactly the kind of mental effort that drains energy and contributes to decision fatigue.

Tip: Gmail (via Gemini) and Outlook (via Copilot) now offer AI tools to summarise threads.

Script:

To get started: Try your tool once or twice a week until it feels easy. If your email system doesn’t have one, browser extensions can help.

5. Organise Your Inbox with Filters

Why: When everything lands in one overwhelming pile, it's harder to know where to focus. Filters can give your brain a break from constant triage.

Inbox Tip: Use filters or “rules” to move newsletters, platform notifications or CC’d messages to labelled folders like “Read Later,” “Subscriptions,” or “Low Priority.”

Bonus: If you use Protonmail, you can colour-code folders - it makes scanning much easier.

To set up: Block 20 minutes to create your folders, then automate the filing. Review monthly.

6. Create Email ‘Work Windows’

Why: Constant inbox-checking splits your focus and ramps up nervous system activation. Batching helps rebuild the capacity for deep focus.

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To trial this: Start with three check-ins a day for a week, then reduce to two if that feels good.

7. Set Your Out-of-Office Early for Your Leave

Why: The days before leave can be chaotic. By setting your auto-reply two days before your holiday begins, you give yourself time to close loops calmly and set clear expectations.

Script:

Make it work: Add a similar message to your Slack/Teams status so others see it even if they don’t email. Since I started doing this, I no longer crash into holidays like a wind-up toy hitting a wall. I feel like I'm easing in because I'm not firefighting new things in the inbox until I go.

8. Reduce FOMO

Why: A 2024 study*** from the University of Nottingham found that fear of missing out (FOMO) around work emails drives compulsive checking. The solution? Smarter internal communication.

Ideas for your team:

• Appoint a named person to handle key internal updates

• Avoid duplicate messages across multiple platforms

• Use clear guidelines for email vs Teams vs newsletters

Start here: Identify one pain point - maybe your team is swamped by weekly newsletters - and trial a more intentional system. Review after a month.

Try One Thing First (and Don’t Go It Alone)

Changing how we relate to our inboxes isn’t easy -most of us are surrounded by colleagues with identical stress habits. The trick? Choose one strategy to trial first and build slowly.

And consider buddying up. Making these changes alongside someone else helps you stay motivated and troubleshoot obstacles as they arise.

And full transparency: I don’t write these because I’ve mastered them - I write them because I need them too. Even if no one reads this far, this blog is a kind of love letter to my over-functioning self: a reminder that I can still achieve and deliver - without burning myself out.

What next?

Use these techniques when you are winding down for your annual leave to help you detach from work - see a full 4-week guide to this here.

References

* Wirth T, Kräft J, Marquardt B, et al Indicators of technostress, their association with burnout and the moderating role of support offers among nurses in German hospitals: a cross-sectional studyBMJ Open 2024;14:e085705. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2024-085705

**Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. 2008. The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 107–110. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072

***Marsh, E., Perez Vallejos, E., & Spence, A. (2024). Overloaded by Information or Worried About Missing Out on It: A Quantitative Study of Stress, Burnout, and Mental Health Implications in the Digital Workplace. SAGE Open, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241268830 (Original work published 2024)