How Sanebox contributes to my Zen Inbox

Earlier this year I published an eBook called Email Zen, Freedom from Email Overload. It detailed all of the things that I have done and continue to do to contribute to calm control when it comes to email. Practicing everything that I preach, I would still spent at least an hour on email a day, and if I’m not careful this hour can turn into two or more.

Email is such a time suck, every email has the potential to distract and create work. This is why it is so important to have a system and to process email at specified times rather than “Check email” all though the day. Although I had managed to reduce the stress of email and thought that I had done as much as I could do it terms of managing email overload, I was mistaken.

Enter Sanebox

I received an email introducing me to Sanebox. I had heard of it before but never thought I needed it. As far as I was concerned I had all the techniques and tactics in order to maintain sanity and I thought I was doing all that I could do. What convinced me to give it a go was that I had begun to receive a lot more spam than normally “Dr Oz Spam” to be precise. How did he know I have been striving to cut my belly fat for so long?! Even resisting these tempting messages and adding them to spam they kept coming. So I thought hell if it will help with my spam I will give it a go.

Help Was at Hand

And it did help with my spam, but it did a lot more than that. According to the Sanebox website “SaneBox is a service that automatically sorts your email into several folders based on each email’s importance.The best part is that you don’t need to train SaneBox. It’s smart enough to figure out which email is important to you”.

SaneBox doesn’t participate in the sending or receiving of your email. Your email server will send and receive email as it always has. They simply monitor your Inbox and when they see an email that is not Inbox-worthy, they get your server to move it to the @SaneLater folder.

You’re Not Coming in Tonight

It effectively works like Security at the Club, it decides who gets in and who doesn’t. “Running Shoes” sorry you’re not coming in, “White Socks” Members only tonight! “Jeans” Go away and come back next week.

The emails that it doesn’t deem to be important are automatically put in your @SaneLater folder, these could be emails where the sender is writing to you for the first time or emails that may have the appearance of spam. But the program learns from your behaviours. It allows you to train emails and move emails that may have gone to the incorrect folder. At first I thought all this training would consume too much time , but quickly I saw how little time it actually consumes and what you are doing is more of a scanning process and once trained that email will never bother you again.

There is also @SaneNews which automatically sends Newsletters and mailing list emails to this folder, this is one I love, I usually use a different email address for signing up to newsletters and check it sporadically to see if there is anything interesting I’m missing out on, there usually isn’t. But I am subscribed to many newsletters through my main email account. Usually products I have bought or colleagues emails newsletters that I intend to read but don’t. In this way I use it like my @read folder. When I’m on hold on a call or if I’m traveling and have time to fill I will scan that folder and read what looks interesting or relevant. I can of course unsubscribe like I advise others to do, but as you know yourself there are some lists you like to stay a part and you can give the emails a quick scan so that you know you are not missing out on any fab parties or other interesting news.

The Bad News

Sanebox is not free 🙁 Yep you gotta pay for it, not too much money but it has a monthly fee depending on the package you invest in. Is it worth it? Definitely, subscriptions start at $6 a month. Is it worth spending $6 to regain hours of time each week? Me think so. If you want to sign up for a free trial of 14 days click on the link below. And please let me know your thoughts when you do try it out. I definitely feel I have been taking life a little more slowly over the past couple of months.