The world needs more champions like Devin D. Thorpe.

An author, speaker and blogger for social good, Devin has big goals for humanity. But between speaking engagements around the world, helping nonprofits tap into crowdfunding and writing about social entrepreneurship for Forbes, it’s tricky finding time for his magnum opus: a book on how to solve the world’s biggest problems by 2045.

Before solving the world’s problems, it turns out, he first needed to solve one of his own. A daily barrage of more than 300 emails was keeping him chained to his inbox, unable to move forward on his world-changing projects.

“I found myself just constantly in my inbox, and I panicked when I wasn’t.”

“I found myself just constantly in my inbox, and I panicked when I wasn’t,” he said. “I was so paranoid that there was some important email coming in that would get missed, so I would keep my email going kind of all day long, and it would just interrupt and interrupt and interrupt.”

For the author of titles such as Your Mark on the World and Crowdfunding for Social Good, writing a book under those circumstances was impossible.

“You cannot write a book while your email is open. You just can’t. You have to really shut off all the distractions and focus for an hour or two at a time to make any progress on writing a book. You can’t write it five minutes at a time. You just lose the flow.”

Feeling stuck in his work was bad enough. But then the email tyranny started extending into other areas of his life.

“It was really a threat to every aspect of my life. It was a threat to my happiness in my marriage and the rest of my family life. It was a threat to my business because I was spending way too much time processing email. It was a threat to my sanity.”

To help ease his fear of missing critical correspondence, Devin needed a reliable way to separate important emails from unimportant ones. He tried using Gmail’s built-in tools to prioritize his inbox, but they didn’t give him the level of control he wanted. He couldn’t find an app that was smart enough to discern the wheat from the chaff.

Then the champion for social good stumbled across SaneBox on Facebook. He knew immediately that he’d found a champion of his own.

“My first impression, 24 hours in, was that I had found the Holy Grail,” he said.

“Now that I know pretty much everything in the SaneLater folder is going to be unimportant, I can sit down on the sofa with my wife at the end of the night, we can watch the news, and I can just cruise through that email.”

SaneBox immediately diverted all of Devin’s unimportant emails into a separate SaneLater folder, keeping them out of sight all day so he could focus on his writing projects. What impressed him the most was the tool’s uncanny ability to anticipate which emails he considered important.

“For me, SaneBox is absolutely providing a meaningful—if not nearly perfect—separation of the important from the unimportant. I’m not having to constantly train it,” he said.

“Now that I know pretty much everything in the SaneLater folder is going to be unimportant, I can sit down on the sofa with my wife at the end of the night, we can watch the news, and I can just cruise through that email.”

With SaneBox, he’s also been able to reclaim those hour-long chunks of time he needs to write productively. With uninterrupted writing time, he’s better able to juggle blogging for his own websites, yourmarkontheworld.com and goodcrowd.info, while writing for Forbes and chipping away at the two books he’s working on simultaneously.

“One hour is hard to find. Without SaneBox, I couldn’t do it,” he said.

“I’m much more comfortable now turning off my email for an hour or two, because what’s going to be in my inbox is six emails, not 60. That feels sane, quite literally. I can deal with those six emails and then go back to working on stuff that’s important. I can be productive and focused. I can turn off all the distractions and not have them nag at me. For me, that’s vital.”

With SaneBox at his back, Devin feels better equipped to tackle the world’s problems.

“It’s hard to express how much I love SaneBox,” he said. “It has saved my life. It has saved my sanity. It has saved my business. It’s amazing.”

About SaneBox

Ready to join Devin and thousands of others in the quest for email sanity? SaneBox is an easy-to-use inbox tool that will make your email manageable again Learn more about the full suite of productivity features, and start today for free »