What would it feel like to be totally on top of your email? How would it change your personal, family, or creative life if you knew you could go an evening or weekend without checking your inbox—and without worrying that you might miss something urgent? What projects could you conquer? What caliber of work could you deliver if you were relieved of the lion’s share of inbox triage?

If you fantasize about a work day that lets you tackle intellectually demanding work before you get sucked into the whack-a-mole of addressing incoming messages, plan an email routine in which dedicated email time is scheduled for after you’ve had a couple of hours of email-free, focused work. If you dream about being able to arrive at work each morning with a fresh tidbit of news or industry insight, stream your most informative newsletters into a folder that you check over breakfast or during your morning commute. And if you simply aspire to escape your current rep as the person who takes forever to answer emails—well, that is totally achievable.

It’s just as legitimate to prioritize your personal and emotional well-being. Perhaps you want to be the kind of parent who comes home at the end of the workday and doesn’t check email until the kids are in bed, if at all. Maybe you’d love to go back to that weekly pickup basketball game with your college buddies—which you’d have time for if you didn’t waste hours reading the jokes and web videos they constantly send you. And it’s okay to admit that you’d rather read a novel for thirty minutes a day than a pile of email newsletters.

The world we live in throws many demands at us—only some of them email related—and all of them are liable to distract us from what we hold to be most important. The clearer you are about what you want to prioritize and what you want to let go of, the easier it will be to set up an email system that works for you. Particularly if you can be disciplined—deciding that you don’t need to read every industry newsletter or know every detail of every current account—you can use rules and filters to reclaim much of the time you now spend on processing email. You’ll be able to pull information out of the folders you’ve created based on your demands, instead of letting your inbox overwhelm you with its demands. The right email system will let you reserve your time and attention for the work and priorities that matter most to you.