My Boss Deleted My Email Asking for a Raise

Back when I had a real job, one day I leaned into my boss’s office and trying not appear too aggressive, asked, “Hey, did you get my email about a potential, uh, raise?”

He leaned back in his chair and without looking at me, said “I deleted it.”

Oh shit, was that his way of saying no? 

He looked at me and added, “Just send it again. I delete all my emails every few months, helps to clear out my inbox.” Seeing the look on my face, he clarified, “If it’s important, they’ll send it again.”

At that time, I used my email inbox as a todo list, trying to work through as many as possible each day, never completing them all, and feeling like crap staring at the residue of my work day every night. Now I still use it as a todo list, but I’ve had zero emails in my inbox every night for 90 straight weeks, and it feels glorious. Here are the principles I use.

1. The Client Isn’t Irrelevant

I use the Superhuman email client. It has a few features that make dealing with email a lot easier and fun, but the principles I’m going to outline only require Gmail, Outlook, or any client with a snooze feature. Superhuman is amazing but it’s also expensive and has a learning curve. If you get more than a hundred emails a day, it might be worth it for you. It also gets the credit for making me think that zero inbox was even a possibility, by providing a cool picture as a gift every time I get to zero.

2. Don’t Deja View — Snooze

Every time you look at your inbox you have to look at the same emails you didn’t deal with the last time you looked. That means every email hits your eyes and consciousness hundreds of times, each time triggering a quantum of angst. Stop torturing yourself.

If there’s an email that I know I can’t deal with today, I’ll snooze it to the day I think I can deal with it. If I’m looking at email on my phone and I need my laptop to read and respond, I’ll snooze an email ‘to my desktop’ and it will open when I next check email on my laptop. Keep items in your inbox that you plan on dealing with in the imminent future.

If you find the same email popping up over and over again at 8am in your inbox, take a moment and think hard about why that is. If it’s been snoozed three times and you still haven’t dealt with it, either delete it or deal with it using one of the other techniques. 

Right now.

Also, when you snooze, snooze it far enough away. And that’s almost always a week or two further away than you think.

3. Mi Todo List es Su Todo List

Your email inbox is a todo list that anybody can add to. Would you accept that with your actual todo list? Do you feel compelled to respond to strangers leaving letters on your doorstep? If you don’t know the person sending you the email, most often you can just ignore and delete. You don’t owe strangers sending you random requests any of your time. Introductions are only valuable when made by someone you already know.

4. Remove vs Resolve

One thing that held me back in the past was thinking I had to ‘solve’ the problem behind each email in order to get rid of it. One day in desperation I thought, what’s the minimum I could do that would just get this out of my inbox? And the answer was suddenly simple, forward it to my lawyer and ask them what they think. Boom, turns out that solved the entire problem. Do the minimum necessary to get it out of your inbox and into someone else’s inbox. It’s often the solution, not just passing the buck.

5. Don’t Despair, Delete

Back to my boss and his advice. If I have an email that I haven’t responded to in more than a few days and there hasn’t been a followup already, it’s usually safe to delete without consequences. If it’s important, they’ll follow up. Be careful applying this to requests from government agencies. 

6. The Remains of the Day

I know it goes against Andrew Huberman’s advice about not looking at a screen before going to bed, but I’ve already tried that advice and it doesn’t improve my sleep. What improves my sleep? Not having any emails in my inbox. So before going to bed I do a final scan of my inbox and quickly snooze everything I haven’t been able to respond to, to tomorrow. That’s usually only a few items, but it took me a few weeks to get it down that low. It’s not like I said this was going to be easy. 

Try these tips for a few days and see how you feel about the results!

My boss did eventually reply to my re-sent email and I got the raise. After all, it was the only email in his inbox.

1. Get a free month of the Superhuman email client.

2. Keep going, read this System Sunday newsletter entry and declutter everything!