You open your email. 47 unread messages. Your brain freezes. Which one matters? Which can wait? The decision fatigue kicks in before you even start. It may even trigger anxiety. Sound familiar?
For ADD brains, it can be exhausting to have too many data points to look at. Especially when details are involved.
For this reason, simplifying email is a great productivity hack if you are an ADD person.
Filters, Forwards, Unsubscribe, and Folders.
Filters– Sometimes setting a filter to mark things as read or to delete them automatically is a game changer. They can eliminate a huge amount of clutter from your inbox.
You can also set up a filter to send a category of email to a folder that you might want to review later. The mail can be automatically marked as read and placed in the folder. That way you can get to it when you want to, or if you never get to it, then maybe it wasn’t that important in the first place.
Forwards- Do you have somebody on your team who handles certain aspects of your business that you don’t need to review? Set up a forward and a filter to mark it as read. That way, if you want to review it later, it’s still in your inbox, but you don’t have to treat it as new mail when it first comes in because it’s forwarded and marked as read.
In my real estate investing business, all responses to offers are forwarded to my acquisitions team. They stay in my inbox but are marked as read automatically. That way, if I want to review them, I can. Otherwise, my acquisitions team is handling them.
Unsubscribe– This is kind of obvious, but if you’re getting repetitive emails from people that you don’t want, it’s just another thing that’s fatiguing your brain. Unsubscribe. And if they don’t have an unsubscribe button easily grab-able in their email, mark them as spam.
Folders– Real talk: I rarely look in my folders. ADD people are ‘out of sight, out of mind’ types. The therapist who diagnosed me with ADD explained it this way: if there’s a piece of paper in a file cabinet across the room, it might as well not exist.
But here’s the thing—sometimes just knowing those emails are somewhere reduces anxiety. I have folders for newsletters and financials. Do I check them? Almost never. But on the rare occasion I need an old QuickBooks email or an Alex Hormozi newsletter, I know where to find it. (He sends too much stuff for me to want it in my inbox).
That’s it, that’s my quick and dirty ADD productivity hack. Minimizing what comes in to your email as a live email will save you some decision fatigue and overwhelm, and allow you to focus on what’s important.
I’ve also written about managing ADD with supplements.
My experience with ADD
I was diagnosed with ADD about 30 years ago. I have been consciously dancing with it and strategizing and trying supplements and health hacks to manage my ADD and be productive in the face of it. I believe it’s a superpower and I believe that it comes with its challenges in the modern world.
A book I like about ADD called “ADD: A Different Perception” by Thom Hartmann talks about how ADD brains are designed for hunting and gathering but not so great for our modern civilized world. We can adapt though!
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