When your inbox owns you

Luis was buried in emails. He was buried in deadlines. And he was buried in anxiety. He woke up each morning, created a 10-item to do list, and then spent his entire day fielding requests from clients over email rather than actually finishing up that list.

He came to my coaching Zoom room because he needed help. After two years of running his web design business, he’d made solid money and worked with a lot of high-quality clients. But the projects he actually cared about (an illustrated children’s book and a podcast) remained unfinished. He couldn’t even start them. Every time he tried, he found himself underwater again, answering emails again, fielding phone calls again.

Enough was enough.

Luis looked successful from the outside. But internally, he felt ruled by other people. He told me that he got upwards of 150 emails per day. It was, in his words, “out of control.”

Luis is obviously not alone. So many of us feel ruled by our inboxes and buried in client requests. Every time you answer an email, another one pops up! And while this can feel like endless opportunity and possibility, it’s also endless pressure. For Luis, it almost always felt like the latter. He couldn’t focus on what mattered to him.

We spent some time digging into the why behind Luis’ behavior. Notably, he had built a reputation of being responsive and kind, so he felt that people expected him to answer their emails right away.