How Do You Stop Losing an Hour a Day to Email?
There are two ways to spend less time on email, and almost everyone buys the wrong one. Writing faster helps a little. Receiving less helps far more, and costs $7.
By Merxtio Staff
There are exactly two ways to spend less time on email. You can make each message faster to deal with, or you can make fewer messages reach you at all.
Almost every AI email tool sells the first. The second is cheaper, less interesting, and does considerably more. This page covers both, says which to buy in what order, and gives you a way to find out where your own hour actually goes. About six minutes.
Find out where the hour goes
You will read that knowledge workers spend some specific number of hours a day on email. Ignore the averages — yours is what matters, and it takes a week to learn.
For five working days, note roughly when you are in your inbox and what the message was. Not a stopwatch; a tally. At the end you will have something more useful than any benchmark: your three highest-volume email types.
That list decides everything downstream. If it is mostly newsletters and notifications, no drafting tool will help you and a filter will fix it this afternoon. If it is mostly genuine correspondence that needs real replies, filtering will not help much and the drafting half is where your money should go.
The two approaches
| Feature | What it does | When it is the right buy |
|---|---|---|
| Filtering | Sorts low-priority mail out of the inbox before you see it, and learns from what you rescue. | Your tally is dominated by newsletters, notifications and mail you skim rather than answer. |
| Drafting | Writes and improves replies, and summarizes long threads. | Your tally is dominated by real correspondence, and the cost is composition rather than volume. |
| A faster client | Reduces the seconds each message takes through keyboard-first navigation, with AI on top. | Email is a core part of the job and you already triage well. The most expensive option. |
| Unsubscribing | Stops the mail existing. Free, permanent, unglamorous. | Always. Do this before paying for anything. |
What each costs
| Item | USD per month, per person |
|---|---|
| Unsubscribing | Free |
| SaneBox Snack, filtering | $7 |
| Grammarly Pro, drafting | $12 |
| Superhuman Pro, faster client | $30 |
| Superhuman Business, with AI | $40 |
The spread is the interesting part. The cheapest paid option addresses the largest share of most people's email problem, and the most expensive addresses the smallest. That is the reverse of how the category is usually presented, because a filter is a boring product and a fast client demos beautifully.
The drafting half, honestly
AI writes a competent email in seconds, and that is a smaller win than it sounds. Composition was rarely the slow part — deciding what to say was, and that part is still yours.
Where it genuinely helps: long threads you have been added to late, where a summary saves five minutes of scrolling. Awkward messages where a first draft breaks the blank-page problem. And routine replies you send in slightly different words twenty times a month, which are better handled as saved templates than regenerated each time.
Where it does not: anything where the difficulty is the decision. A tool that drafts a confident answer to a question you have not resolved has made things worse, not faster.
The editing layer is the quiet winner here, because it works in every message without being opened — the same argument the writing stack guide makes at more length, where the annual billing gap is worth $18 a month on its own.
Do it in this order
Tally one week before spending anything
You’ll have: Your three highest-volume email types, written down. · about Five minutes a day
This is the step that decides whether you buy a filter or a writer, and it is the one everybody skips in favor of buying both.
Unsubscribe ruthlessly, then bulk-delete
You’ll have: An inbox that reflects this year rather than the last five. · about 30 minutes, once
Search your inbox for "unsubscribe" and work through the results. Anything you have not opened in three months goes.
This is unglamorous and it is the single largest reduction available, because it removes mail permanently rather than sorting it. Do it before any subscription, or you will be paying a tool to filter messages you could have stopped.
Add filtering if your tally was mostly noise
You’ll have: An inbox where what remains is what needed you. · about 10 minutes to set up, a week to settle
Filters need a little training. Expect to rescue a few things in the first week, which is how they learn, and to leave them alone after that.
The measure of success is not an empty inbox — it is opening the inbox and finding that everything in it deserves to be there.
Add drafting help only for the types that survived
You’ll have: Faster replies on the mail that genuinely needs one. · about 15 minutes
Now the remaining volume is real correspondence, so drafting assistance is aimed at something. Start with what already lives in your mail client rather than a new subscription: an editing layer in the browser, or your provider's built-in suggestions.
Save the replies you send repeatedly as templates. A saved template beats a generated draft for anything you send more than a few times a month, because it needs no editing and no thought at all.
Routing messages into a task manager, or triggering a workflow when a particular kind of email lands, is a different problem and a different tool — that is automation across applications rather than inside the inbox, and it gets its own guide. Before buying anything here, the four-question test in the tool selection guide applies, and question one is unusually decisive: email is daily for everyone, which means anything that genuinely helps will be used, and anything that does not will be obvious within a week.
Questions people ask
- How do I spend less time on email?
- Tally a week first to find your three highest-volume message types. If they are newsletters and notifications, unsubscribe and then filter — that removes mail rather than speeding it up. If they are genuine correspondence, drafting and summarizing help instead. Most people buy the second when they needed the first.
- Is SaneBox worth it?
- At $7 a month for one account it is the cheapest paid fix in the category and addresses the largest share of most inboxes. It sorts rather than writes, so it is the right purchase when your problem is volume and the wrong one when your problem is composition.
- What is the best AI email assistant?
- There is no single answer because two different jobs share the name. For reducing what arrives, a filter from about $7. For writing and summarizing, an editing layer at $12 or your mail provider’s built-in features. For raw speed, a keyboard-first client at $30 to $40.
- Can AI answer my emails for me?
- It can draft them well. Letting it send unattended is a different proposition, and one worth resisting for anything with consequences — a confident reply to a question you have not actually decided on is worse than a slow one. Drafts yes, autopilot no.
- Is Superhuman worth $30 a month?
- Only if email is genuinely a large part of your job and you already triage well. It sells speed per message, which is the smallest of the three levers for most people. Note also that the AI features sit on the higher tier at about $40, not the $30 one.
- How do I stop getting so many emails?
- Unsubscribe first — search your inbox for the word and work through the results. It is free, permanent, and larger than anything a tool will do for you. Filtering is what you add afterwards for the mail you cannot stop but do not need to see immediately.