Sinking in the Sand
How Your Inbox is Holding Your Masterpiece Hostage
by Lisa Norman
We talk a lot about protecting our writing time. We close the office door, put on noise-canceling headphones, and warn our families that if the house isn't actively on fire, we are invisible.
But there’s a quiet, heavy burden sitting right on your desk, masked as a tool of the trade.
Your inbox.
Once upon a time, email was a digital mailbox—a nice place where readers sent fan mail, agents sent contracts, and colleagues sent ideas. Today, it feels more like a slow-moving swamp of quicksand. Every single day, a fresh layer of digital noise pours over us: sophisticated phishing scams, AI-generated pitches, and endless newsletters we signed up for years ago and never read.
Before you know it, you aren't managing your correspondence anymore. You’re just trying to keep your head above the sand.
The Quicksand Real-World Horror
Years ago, I had a client whose email address was harvested by a particularly nasty scam group. Within days, his inbox was flooded faster than he could physically hit the delete key. Fake invoices, urgent security alerts, and desperate pleas cascaded in by the thousands.
He tried to keep up. He spent hours every day frantically scanning the noise, terrified he’d miss a real customer contact, a valid invoice, or an important career link.
You know what happened? He lost the real contacts anyway. The digital quicksand completely swallowed them. The overwhelming noise paralyzed his business, drained his mental energy, and eventually forced him to do the unthinkable: delete the address entirely, abandon his established contacts, and start over from scratch, new business cards and all.
That was a decade ago. Today, the swamp is wider, and the quicksand pulls harder.
I recently talked to a brilliant author and editor who confessed she was staring at nearly 7,000 unread emails in her business account alone. She spends valuable time every single day just shoo-ing the digital vermin away, watching the junk pour in faster than she can clear it, while warnings pop up that her storage capacity is hitting the danger zone.
If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. When I’m working with authors and entrepreneurs, I often see accounts with 20 thousand or more unread emails.
This is not your fault.
But we have to talk about what that struggle is actually costing your creativity.
The Mental Weight of the Unread
When your unread count climbs into the hundreds—or the thousands—you aren't just letting data pile up. You’re carrying a massive cognitive load. Your brain is trying to survive the quicksand pull of those unmade decisions.
Our brains aren't built to process a chaotic crowd of strangers screaming for our attention all at once. Yet every time you open your email to look for a specific note from your editor, your brain has to process through that quicksand. You glance past a discount code for shoes, a pitch from a publicist you don't know, a fake notification claiming your streaming account is suspended, and three urgent-sounding requests for your time.
You might think you’re just ignoring them, but your brain is actively working to filter them out. It’s making micro-decisions with every scroll: Is this a scam? Is this real? Do I owe this person money? By the time you finally find the email you needed, your creative energy for the day is cut in half. Your focus has been pulled into a dozen different directions. The scammers and marketers didn't have to steal your identity to win. They just had to steal the best part of your attention.
As writers, our brains are our creative sanctuaries. We need deep, uninterrupted focus to build worlds, untangle plots, and understand our characters. When we leave our digital front door wide open to every salesman and random notification, we are telling our creative souls that their peace doesn't matter. We’re letting the sands of wasted time swirl around us, pulling us down.
Finding Solid Ground
You don't have to live in a state of constant digital overwhelm.
Getting your digital house in order isn't about being a corporate efficiency expert. It’s about building a safe harbor around your creativity. It’s about ensuring that when you sit down to write, your brain isn't secretly chewing on an unread message hyping an artificial crisis.
If you feel yourself sinking, here are three ways to stop struggling and find solid ground:
- Separate the Rooms: Your fan mail, your industry newsletters, and your critical business or bank alerts don’t want to sit in the same inbox. When they all crowd into one space, the noise chokes out the important messages. Build digital walls so the vermin can't find your sacred creative space.
- Declare Email Bankruptcy: If you are sitting on thousands of unread emails, accept the truth: you are never going to read them. Select them all and hit Archive—not delete. They are still searchable if an emergency arises, but they are out of your sight. Clear a path so you have a safe place to stand. By hitting Archive we leave behind the fear that we’ve missed out on something critical. It will be there if we need it.
- Guard Your Access: Stop giving your email address away for free downloads you don't care about. And don't just substitute a throw-away address that piles up digital clutter elsewhere. Every time you fill out a form, you are giving a stranger explicit permission to interrupt your writing day. Be stingy with your access.
Your inbox can become a tool that serves your career, not a quicksand pit that swallows your time. Don't let digital quicksand stand between you and your next book.
How many unread emails are currently pulling at your attention? What is one small boundary you can set today to keep the digital noise out of your creative space?
* * * * * *
About Lisa
Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not hanging out with her family, writing, or teaching, she can be found wandering the local beaches.
Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.
Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors! This post is based upon a lesson from her class, Digital Organization Skills for Authors.
Her most recent book, The Work of Joy is now available here.
Top image from depositphotos.
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31 comments on “Sinking in the Sand”
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Best advice I was given occurred at the beginning of email and the internet—to create folders and sort mail immediately upon opening it if I was keeping it. Then, I started using a program where I could have the mail filtered into folders automatically.
Now I have a second address, which I use for signing up for programs, ads, newsletters, launches, etc., because I'm not 100% sure how much email they'll be sending out or if they'll be selling my address. I use a pseudonym with that address too. Second best thing I've ever done regarding email.
Your advice of dumping a full inbox into an archive folder is great advice. I've done it on occasion when a life-changing event or a vacation creates a huge pile. It's easy to then sort by correspondent and delete lots of messages at once. Great post!
So here's a question, Diana - do you occasionally go in and delete everything in that extra inbox?
This hits home hard.
I'm managing to keep my head above water email-wise, but the amount of them coming in everyday is frustrating. Your advice to be stingy with the address is one thing I will definitely do.
There are some messages I should get to and have guilt over putting off. I think that may have to do with feeling overwhelmed.
I never thought to archive! Thanks for the great ideas, Lisa!
Sometimes we just NEED that email bankruptcy and to acknowledge that we can't get to it. Or create a template reply... When that guilt hits, how many of those people who you owe an email to would WANT you to feel that guilt?
I am very stingy about my email address. This is the third email I've read today. I have 11 more in 2 accounts combined. Then I can get to work. One more tip. If you receive anything you never read, click unsubscribe. (Be sure it's a legit thing first.) Those few seconds will save you a lot over time.
Sometimes unsubscribing can be a problem - it lets the senders know they've connected to a live one. There are also several "block sender" options under "Junk," which can block unsolicited emails without the senders knowing if you're real. I don't think the block options are fool-proof, but they do help to screen the unwanted stuff.
Sally - so true. The catch is to only block the ones that aren't legit and to unsubscribe to the ones who ARE legit. There are new laws that say we MUST have a one button unsubscribe visible on any email we send. Remember those "why?" follow up questions? Technically those are in violation of modern anti-spam laws now.
One of the harshest things you can do to a legit writer's newsletter is to block it. That sends a signal back and hits their deliverability hard. There's a percentage that is okay... but it does significantly impact them. Use responsibly!
This is why I specifically mentioned making sure a thing is legit first. Unsubscribing is great for that newsletter you signed up for but never read. It also often works for that company you bought something from once, especially if it's a big enough company. Setting your Spam filters can also help, but you have to be careful it doesn't cut what you want as well as what you don't.
Debbie - all powerful recommendations!
Absolutely, Debbie! And that's the challenge not only as readers... but as writers. We need to remember that our readers' time is valuable! How can we be one of the ones they always open??
Maybe it's how my email is set up, but one of my email accounts holds archives but when I open that folder, it says there's nothing there. Archives display all right in the other email account that has an archive folder. Weird. And I have never sent emails to either archive folder (because I don't know how it works), so I don't know why these folders contain any emails in the first place. Any tips on what to look for in my settings? Thanks! (from a techno-ninny)
Fortunately, I am not in the multitudes-of-unread-emails camp - I clear them out every morning. Opened emails, on the other hand, do number in the thousands, as do emails in my Sent folder. I spend an hour or so every week, processing a few of them, both Inbox and Sent - filing them in business or project folders, then deleting them - but they add up quickly when my schedule is heavily loaded.
Ideally if you move them to the folder you shouldn't need to delete them from where you moved them from. How things wind up in archive is different for different platforms. If you are on gmail, sometimes archive just means that you've taken it out of inbox and not put it in a folder? Depends on how your system is set up. Is it possible you have a filter set up on your email that automatically moves things? Don't tell me your address - but tell me which program you are using: Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, webmail... and maybe I can give you some specifics.
Thanks, Lisa. That’s a good reminder to clean out my email. I’m a big believer in unsubscribing to the emails I no longer want to receive.
Absolutely, Susan! Unsubscribe, delete, check and delete spam... all of that. I had a situation the other day where my *trash* got too big. LOL. Now I empty that almost daily as well.
We need to keep our systems as lean as possible. I'm thinking we need an email fight practice!
An email fight practice - I love it!! lol 😂
I like to spend one day a month getting my inbox down below one hundred. I also spend that day unsubscribing. I have a friend with over 2000 emails in her inbox, and I have to text her whenever I send her something important via email, or it just gets lost in the crowd. Do I miss important emails? All the time, and my inbox right now is about 200. Gotta run...the newsletters, emails, translations and new stories are calling.
Ugh. That's a whole day each month that it is taking from you! Better to lose those emails. Your friend's are lost already... but to be fair, I've seen people with over 30k unreads... so... context... Every one of those pending bits is a tiny nibble at your creativity. Thankfully you're a super-powered individual with extra! Try the archive all trick. See how that feels. Nothing will be lost!
There is a solution that no one mentioned that works for me. I have an assistant who's a college student majoring in journalism and creative writing and he goes through my tons of messages on three email accounts and saves only the important ones for me and discards the rest. He's also a whiz at research for my stories and newspaper work.
We hire assistants for all kinds of chores that would otherwise overwhelm us and drain our energy and creativity so why not for this? Our time is worth money and it's less expensive and less stressful to pay for help in some areas.
Brad - and that is definitely a powerful use of that assistant. You're buying brain space and training that person, helping them out. You can also give them standardized answers and directions - I'm sure you've already done that.
For those who feel they can't afford this, there's always AI assistants. The human is more reliable, though.
Good point, Brad!
I have over 400 staring at me. But I changed the way I look at them. I do the new ones first--get them out of the way. Then I do at least 25 of the old ones that I wanted to read after cleaning out the new things. I went from over 600 to 400 and falling. By the time I clean up the "old" stuff, I'll be down to maybe 10 emails that are reminders of meeting or classes that will disappear when those are finished. Everything else will need to be read on the day it arrives. That alone will cut my email time from over two hours to less than an hour a day with no backlog to worry about.
I am reading this one on the day I got it. When I finish with this comment, I'm onto my 25 of the back log and then on to writing after taking a 30 min break to clear my head of email.
That's a great approach!
I read Building a Second Brain by Tiego Forte (he's since moved on to new and more powerful approaches) but he suggested having a folder for areas of topics that I wanted to read but didn't have time for. Something interesting happened - I started dropping those things into their folder unread. When I needed them, I could read them all and absorb the knowledge, right?
What stunned me is that the world shifted and several of those folders were knowledge that no longer is relevant. I didn't need it at the time, and I don't need it now! It was there if I *did* need it, but it was out of sight and didn't take up my brain space.
I have a special folder for things I want to read... currently too many there, for sure. These are things I WANT to read before I file them. But it is amazing how many of those expire before they are ever relevant.
For me, the reminders of meetings with their links go into my calendar. I'm aggressive with my email. Keep going - you're going to hit inbox zero and be amazed how much time that'll give you!
Excellent timing for this post. This is my struggle. I can't keep up with the number of emails coming in every day. I'm sitting at around 1000 emails and can't seem to bring it down.
Archive it all and start fresh, Cynthia. The things that are important will resurface. Then each day - attack ruthlessly. Delete, store elsewhere, or archive as fast as possible. They don't deserve a space in your brain!
Lisa, I did it. I pushed the archive button. OMG. I have 2 emails in my inbox now. I had no idea how much the thousands of emails in that inbox weighed on me. Now, I'll work dang hard to keep that inbox manageable. Thank you.
Woohoo, Lynette! Yay!
You just reclaimed a ton of your time and energy. And yes, they DO weigh on us! And they're not gone. Just not in the "must deal with now" pile.
Enjoy that creative space! I've done this with a whole bunch of authors in my classes and it is always life-changing.
Wow! I'm so impressed with you right now, Lynette!
I have 4 inboxes at the moment, and it gets super old. I love your Archive suggestion!
I've only got 3 main ones and 3 mostly unused ones. I've got one that I treat as my main archive and I send everything there that I want to save and search for. I've got a huge archive of important messages going back well over a decade. Very useful when I try to remember what I was working on for a client 5 years ago!
That's a great idea to archive them.
Thanks for reading, Denise! I hope the ideas help!
Timely, even if accidently. Only away for three days, last week, at a book festival. Overwhelmed, not getting on with my own work
For complex reasons ( ID fraud) I'm almost too wary of sharing any address. Two writers' groups, WordPress, one real name, one pen,