LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has one simple rule for spending less time on emails: Stop sending them. Or at least, try to send fewer.
"It may sound somewhat overly simplistic, but it's highly effective," he told CNBC's Adam Bryant.
Weiner learned this simple lesson as an executive at Yahoo. At that time, he worked with a lot of people who were "intense users of email," he says. When those employees left the company, Weiner could feel the volume of emails drop off.
"I could see that it was having an impact on my inbox," he says. "What essentially I came to learn was because they sent out email quite a bit and I responded quite a bit, that would generate more emails, and round and round it would go."
To take control of his inbox, Weiner sets boundaries. For instance, he doesn't send email between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., he said in an interview for Thrive Global. At least once in the morning and once in the evening he makes time to clear his inbox.
Another way to cut back on the emails you receive, he says, is to firmly separate the "To" field from "Cc."
"Everyone on the "To" line thinks they should be in a position to respond, and every time someone responds, someone else feels the need to respond," Weiner says.
The CEO also suggests emails be brief and to the point. "It's easy to overlook the clarity and brevity of emails," he says. "The longer and more complex an email, the more questions get raised."
Weiner often prefers a phone call over an email, particularly with people working outside of the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. A simple conversation is also a better fit for complicated topics or even "volatile" situations.
"Sometimes it's best to just say 'Let's take this offline, get together and provide additional context as to why people are upset or why there's friction'," he says. "You can resolve things much faster that way."
Article has been updated with the name of the outlet that interviewed Weiner about his email sending schedule.Â
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