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18th November, 2025

How to FINALLY Get on Top of Your Emails

With Dr Stephen Ginn

Photo of Dr Stephen Ginn

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On this episode

Email pretty much runs our workdays. We’re constantly bombarded with messages from all directions – patient information, rota changes, newsletters, and administrative updates all landing in the same indiscriminate inbox. It’s easy to feel constantly behind, overwhelmed, and disempowered.

But we have more power over our inboxes than we think. By creating systems, setting boundaries, and changing our mindset about email, we can transform it from a source of stress into a manageable tool.

First, we need to stop viewing email as a to-do list and start processing it intentionally. Then, we must communicate boundaries to colleagues about how and when we use email. Finally, implementing small productivity hacks like deferring sending until later can prevent endless back-and-forth conversations.

When email rules our workday, our productivity diminishes as our stress levels rise. Valuable deep work time gets wasted on low-value tasks, and the constant interruptions fragment our attention and make it harder to give our best to patients or to important projects.

But rather than being a constraint, organisation can set you free, and small improvements compound over time. You don’t need a perfect system; just one that works well enough for you.

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About the guests

Dr Stephen Ginn photo

Reasons to listen

  • To regain control of your inbox by setting up effective email systems, rules, and filters that work specifically for you
  • To discover practical strategies for processing emails efficiently, rather than merely checking them
  • To understand how to communicate clear email boundaries with colleagues to reduce unnecessary messages and prevent your inbox from dictating your workday

Episode highlights

00:02:44

A World Without Email

00:04:29

Can we control what comes into our inbox?

00:05:51

How to file away emails from specific mailing lists

00:07:55

Why it’s probably OK to delete more emailr

00:08:58

When unsolicited email puts demands on your timer

00:14:10

4,500 weeks lost in email

00:17:00

Throwing naughty monkeys via email

00:18:07

Schedule your email to send later

00:20:09

How to take yourself out of the loop when delegating a task

00:23:44

How to avoid people misreading your tone

00:25:11

How to schedule emails to send later

00:26:45

How to separate your inbox from your todo list

00:33:16

Set your intention

00:37:41

The Inbox Zero method

00:43:01

Stephen’s top tips

00:47:13

Email signatures and copy-and-paste replies

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Rachel: Your inbox is somebody else’s to-do list. Now, LinkedIn, productivity books, and podcasts are awashed with sentiments like this, trying to give us more autonomy over our inboxes. But it doesn’t always help, especially if you are working in a high stress, high sex job and juggling urgent information about patients with rota changes, purchase notifications, and newsletters. You need more than a glib one liner. You need a system that works. [00:00:25] Rachel: That’s why this week I’m joined by Dr. Stephen Ginn, a psychiatrist who got in touch with the show and shared a great article…

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