Your emails are against you
We’ll be the first to say it: email is a magical thing. You can send a message to your friends in Bora Bora while you’re holed up in the middle of winter in New Jersey. You can read travel newsletters and imagine the person you’ll become when you get away. You can message your heroes and friends in a span of seconds.
But we both know there’s a dark side to emails.
We are getting too familiar with the term (and the feeling) of email overload. Actually, 85% of Americans reported feeling stress and fatigue from email specifically. That’s not surprising, considering that Americans are spending over five hours (!) a day checking email. And it’s not necessarily for work tasks. Indeed, they spend more time checking their personal email (172 minutes) than their work email (149 minutes). Nearly 40 percent of younger workers, including Millennials and Gen Z check their work email while still in bed.
It’s not possible to simply stop emailing (though, trust us, we’ve tried). For many of us, we need emails. That’s how we work, that’s how we communicate, that’s how our kids' schools remind us of the nth project we have to bring for them next Monday. We can’t just shut it out. And yet, so many of us are experiencing email fatigue.
Is what we get in return actually worth the overload we feel? And how many of the emails we go through and spend our time and mental energy on give us a clear benefit? Well, spam messages account for over 45% of e-mail traffic. And it’s not surprising that Americans only open half of the emails they receive and only find 31 percent of the emails they receive actually useful. But each and every one of those emails screams for your attention. And many get it. Brands default to email marketing because it has been proving its effectiveness at driving purchases. And it’s time to break free.
Over the years, a lot of solutions have been thrown around. Chunk the time you spend on emails! Only open your email provider 1x a week! Set up auto messages and only reply to the most important messages.
Those are great theories, but how does it actually work? How do you know which emails are important if you get thousands of emails a day? How do you deal with the fear of missing an important message if you only check your email 1x a week? How do you stay on top of it all and, better yet, how do you manage the anxiety from not checking your email?
We don’t think you need to chase Inbox 0 or become some sort of email zen master. Instead, we think you should have a digital housekeeper that manages it for you. That’s why we created Yorba: to give you a single source of truth for all your emails, paid subscriptions, data breaches, and more.
For being so necessary, unsubscribing is super complex. We took the pain out of it by letting you see the newsletters you get, check important stats (like how many you actually read, how many new ones you get, and more), and quickly sort the emails into ones you want to keep (I’m looking at you, kids’ school newsletter. You’re a necessary evil), and the ones you want to delete.
Then you just tap unsubscribe and boom! Cleaner inbox.
Now if only you could remember to uncheck the “I consent to receiving marketing messages” box whenever you check out online. Which reminds us, check out this recommended reading on how to reduce your online accounts in the first place.
