Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. SaneBox is a service that sorts emails based on who the email is coming from and the subject line of the email. That sounds so simple, but it makes such a difference. Using SaneBox can vastly reduce the number of interruptions in your day.
Whether you are drafting a brief, doing legal research, or preparing a contract, you need uninterrupted focus time to do your best work. But of course, getting uninterrupted time is a luxory, and email is often one of the biggest obsticles. Even if you can deal with each email quickly, every time you do so, you need to take the the time to return focus to what you were working on.
You cannot get rid of interruptions completely. But you can minimize them by using SaneBox. I’ve written in the past about how SaneBox can improve your relationship with email by automatically filing your less emails into different folders. For example, by turning on the SaneLater feature, messages that are likely to be less important automatically go into a separate folder. And every email that doesn’t show up in your Inbox is one less interruptinos to your day. By turning on the SaneNews feature, newsletters—which you almost certainly don’t want to take the time to read while you are focusing on a project—automatically go into the @SaneNews folder. SaneBox keeps these less important emails out of sight and out of mind, until a later point in the day when you are ready to take the time to look at them. Meanwhile, important emails still go straight to your Inbox.
What if SaneBox makes a mistake, putting an email into your @SaneLater folder when it is the type of email that you normally want to see right away? You can fix this without fiddling with any control panels or settings. Simply drag the email from the @SaneLater folder into your Inbox. That’s it. That will train the SaneBox AI so it does what you want in the future.
There are other SaneBox features that you can also use to minimize interruptions such as the Snooze feature. You can enable folders such as @SaneTomorrow, @SaneNextWeek, and @SaneNextMonth. (Or you can configure any other time period.) Move an email into the @SaneTomorrow folder and it will disappear from your Inbox until sunrise the next day, keeping your Inbox clean for today. If you want, you can enable auto-replies for snoozed emails to let the sender know that you will get back to them soon.
You can also free up your headspace by setting reminders right from your Inbox. Just forward a message to a reminder address like 1day@sanebox.com and you’ll get a reminder in your chosen time frame.
With SaneBox automatically organizing your emails, you can spend much less time in your Inbox, which means more time getting your important work done with fewer interruptions.
If this sounds interesting to you, click here to get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. If you decide that you prefer getting all of the intrruptinos, then just don’t sign up. But if you appreciate having more time to focus on getting your work done, using this link in this post will give you a generous $25 credit for when you pick a plan. I’ve been using SaneBox since 2022, and I really like the service, so perhaps you will too.
Thanks again to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month.