How many emails are in your inbox? How much time do you spend scanning over emails that are already seen, thinking about what you have to do to each one? Inbox zero, which is not the number of emails in your inbox, minimizes the time you spend in your inbox. Today I share my current (as of 2019) method of processing email.

I had a shock the other day. I was at a co-worker’s computer to help her with some code, and saw that she had 32,000+ emails in her inbox. Unread. I understand that we get a lot of email every day, mostly status messages from the system. But this floored me. How many are in my inbox? Zero. Now I understood why she could never find anything that wasn’t from the current day, and was always saying, “I didn’t see that email.”

It’s really not that hard to stay on top of your email.

Always Empty Inbox

Inbox zero, as I said above, is not the number of emails in your inbox. It is the time it takes you to process your email. Having excess email in your box just sends your mind on a tailspin of thinking you’ve already done – specifically trying to figure out what needs to be done next with the email in front of you. If you keep email in your inbox, you will keep rehashing those questions every time you open your inbox.

Inbox zero cannot be obtained – because that would mean your inbox would require absolutely no input from you. (Maybe in the future? Wouldn’t that be nice?) But we can minimize the amount of time we spend in our inboxes.

Email Actions

There are a limited amount of things we can do with email. They contain information that can be thrown away, information that needs to be kept for future reference, things we need to take action on, things we need others to take action on, and appointments.

So why not take those actions as soon as we receive the email? That is the basis of my current system.

Action (Task List)

These are for things that I need to take action on. I don’t work from my inbox, I work from Remember the Milk (home) and ToDoIst (work). So anything I need to take action on gets forwarded to the task manager and the email filed in a folder indicating it’s been passed to the task manager.

If I need to delegate the task, I send it over to to the task manager with the preface: “delegate”. Then I can send the information via email and track it in my task manager.

File

If I need to save the information for later, I will put the label on it right away (Gmail, home), or drag it to the appropriate folder (Outlook, work). If it is something that will expire or become obsolete, I also mark it for future review. In Gmail I put a label on it for purging, and in Outlook I put a tag.

Delete/Unsubscribe

If the email is not something I need, I delete it right away. This is particularly true for the 43 status emails I get from our work systems daily. Once I have verified all is well, off to the trash they go.

If the email is from a newsletter, I evaluate the content. If there is little to be gained, I will unsubscribe immediately before deleting.

Conclusion

It’s a pretty straightforward process to manage my email. I take everything in one swoop and process all the way through. I do this two times a day for each system, and can spend as little time as possible in my email.

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If you are like most people, you have a lot of emails in your inbox, either unread or waiting for action. In fact, one study found that the average worker had 199 unread emails in their inbox. [1] Another study found that workers receive 121 emails per day. [2]

That is a lot of email to be confronted with every time you open your inbox.

The problem with this is that if you don’t empty out and process the emails (also known as “keeping up with it”), you will have to scan all those emails every time you open the program. And the longer the list, the longer the scan, and that means a whole lot of wasted time.

But what can you do about it? You can clear out and get a fresh start.

A Word of Caution

The following steps will work on both personal and business email. However, there are consequences to every action, and you have to evaluate if there will be negative consequences to following any of the steps below. I take no responsibility for your choices.

Also, if you are one of those people whose backlog is in the thousands, don’t read any further. You need something different, and I suggest you look up Pat Flynn’s podcast on how he handled his backlog.

Move Everything Out Of The Way

The first step to getting a fresh start is to move all of the existing email out of the way.

I do not mean to put them all in the trash. No, seriously. I once had a client that threw away her entire inbox at the end of the year – including the emails for code approvals that then set projects behind by weeks.

Instead, make a folder in your email client and call it “backlog.” Then move everything from the inbox into this folder.

Set Up Filters

Most of the email we get isn’t really important to us. At my current client I get 134 emails every day alerting me to the various system statuses for that day’s processing. At home, 90% of my email requires absolutely no action by me, and honestly, I don’t really even need the information provided.

The answer to these is to set up filters. Look through your backlog and see if there are email you consistently get that could be stored somewhere else for the duration.

For instance, for my status emails, I have three folders, one each for each system. I use the subject lines of the emails to figure out which system each belongs to, and then I send the email to a folder based on that information. I scan those folders for failures (which I also mark via filter). This does two things: keeps the noise out of the inbox, and lets me see very quickly if there have been any failures.

Set Up Processing Folders

If your goal is to get through your email (as opposed to having it moulder in your inbox), you can speed this up by sorting your email into folders based on what you need to do to it. Once you have read an email, you know what needs to be done. Here are the processing folders I use:

• Read – to read more thoroughly
• Respond – for things that require a response that will take less than 15 minutes
• Enter – for information that needs to be entered into another program, like a calendar or my bookkeeping system
• Task – for those items that require more work, I send them to my task system. This includes items that will take more than 15 minutes to answer or require research.
• Waiting – for those items I am waiting on
• Trash – for those items I don’t need anymore

Process By Timer

Next, process through your inbox, then your backlog, from the most recent email, using a timer. Using a timer can keep you from being overwhelmed, as well as keep you focused. (See Timer Tricks)

Open each email, quickly read through it, and either put it in one of the processing folders you created, or file it for future reference.

Do several timer sessions a day. They can be as short as 5 minutes, but don’t make them longer than 20 or you run the risk of being overwhelmed.

By approaching the email like this, you will keep up with the incoming as well as chipping away at the backlog.

Reminder: No Action, Just Sorting

This bears repeating: as you are working through the email, don’t do anything other than sort. It is really tempting to stop what you are doing to “just answer this one”. Taking action will keep you mired in your backlog.

Instead, schedule another time (using your timer) and work through one of the folders. Enter all of the items into the other systems. Respond to a few emails. But remember to do it separately from sorting.

Conclusion

Processing through a backlog of email can be done with a bit of effort, a few folders and some dedicated time to sorting. By following the process outlined above, you should be able to start the year with a clean inbox!

Action Steps

Try out the process above and let me know how it streams your email processing.

[1] https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/average-inbox-199-unread-emails
[2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/email-statistics/

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I recently listened to a podcast on the subject of managing email from a man with whose views I mostly agree. Instead of agreeing, though, I found myself shouting “NO” at the car stereo as I drove to work. So today I will go over Get-It-Done Guy Stever Robbins’s 7 Pro Tips for Managing Your Bursting Email Inbox. Today I will talk about why I disagreed so vehemently and what I think should be done instead.

Big Difference Between Work and Home

First of all, let me point out that not all email is created equal. The email you receive at home is very different than what you receive in the office. Both should be treated differently, to a certain extent. Just looking at the two should be enough to convince you of this: the home email is probably filled with notifications that require few responses, receipts and junk; work email, on the other hand, will be filled with requests and tasks concerning your business function.

You can often ignore your home email for days with little consequence. Doing the same at work will bring people to your desk ranting about your unresponsiveness. Or worse.

Most of these points are being written about work email, so we’ll take it in that light.

That being said, let’s proceed to Stever’s points:

Throw Away Vacation Email

In this point, Stever recommends that you set your Out Of Office message to tell people you will be deleting everything on your return. He then says you should instruct them to send things again once you are back.

This tip assumes that there is a person on the other end of the email, and everything that is not sent by an actual person is pointless.

I disagree with this.

In the last week, I received a notice that my network login was expiring – the day after I returned. I also received notification that an important meeting was moved. Both of these were sent by systems, and wouldn’t have cared if I sent a reply back telling them to resend. Nope, the world goes on. Had I not seen those emails the day I got back, I would have had to beg a co-worker to put in a ticket to unlock my account, and I would have been in the wrong city for a meeting.

In addition, I received information from the president of my client firm on a significant merger that will impact what I do.

Can you imagine what impression it would make for the CEO of my client firm to receive a response from me saying, “I’m out, resend your email in a week.”

I shudder to think about this.

Instead of throwing everything out: put all the email in your inbox in a folder, and then use your search function to wade through it. Start at the top. If the first email is worthless, find all the other email like it and delete those. Proceed down the list. If there is something you need to review further, move it back to your inbox. When you are done, the stuff you need to pay attention to will be in your inbox, and everything else would be gone.

[Using Gmail and need to know how to search effectively? I have specific information in my e-book, Taming the Gmail Dragon.

Catch Up on the Most Recent Email From Each Thread

In this one, Stever recommends that you go to the bottom of the last email and read up, because people will reply leaving the original intact.

While this seems like it would work, in practicality it depends on how your email program handles threading. The danger is that there is a divergent email chain somewhere, but gets lost in the threading by the program.

Instead of working from the bottom: Work from the top, skimming each email. The first email should give you a good idea of what the general issue is, and then you can quickly work down, reading only the top part and following the chain. Of course, if the email has nothing relevant to you, delete it outright.

In addition, check to see if you are a main recipient, or have been copied on the message “for information”. If you’re just a CC, delete it or move it to somewhere that you can check should it become necessary.

Don’t Use “Reply All”

Stever argues that reply all wastes the time of everyone on the message.

I agree with this rule. No one should ever use Reply All. Including the president of my company, who informed everyone a few months back that he would like the fish at the upcoming company meeting.

However, this rule doesn’t go far enough.

There will always be some person who will respond to an email with a Reply All. Either because they think that their response is worthy of everyone’s time, or because they are just clueless. This includes the person who replied all to my pointed “Stop Replying To All” message – sent on a thread about music at my church that had just gone into the 23rd email response. His reply all? “I agree. Stop replying to all.” (Looking for wall to bang my head against)

In addition: Don’t give them the chance to do a reply all. If you are sending out an email to a large group, put yourself in the To field, and put everyone else in the BCC field. No more accidental Reply Alls. If you feel it is necessary to indicate who the message is going to, put it at the bottom of the email.

In addition: call a meeting. If you truly have something to share on a topic that several people need to hear and weigh in on, call a meeting. It will be better because everyone will get the same information, but will be able to share and build on it without dozens of emails.

Force Inbox Zero

Stever maintains that the fastest way to get to Inbox Zero is to delete everything in your inbox.

Sigh.

That would work, if Inbox Zero was about the quantity of email in your inbox. But it’s not.

Instead, Inbox Zero is about how much time you spend in your inbox (See Inbox Zero: Myth or Fact?)

The whole idea behind Inbox Zero is to make the decision on what to do with your email once, and then get the email out of the inbox. My preferred way of doing this is to have folders for the actions I have to take: enter in my task list, respond, file, delegate, delete or defer. Once the email goes in, I either process each folder by hand to do the actions required, or have an automated system do it for me. For instance, all email that lands in my AutoRTM folder in my personal email get sent on to Remember The Milk without me doing anything further.

Instead of forcing an empty inbox: make a system that allows you to quickly decide what must be done with each item, and routinely process your inbox into that system.

Check Email Deliberately

In this point, Stever says that you should not allow email to interrupt you.

With this, I wholeheartedly agree.

However, he doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion. He says to turn off the badges and notifications. That’s good.

In addition, exit your email program. Don’t keep it open on your desktop, nor in a browser tab. Close it out, and make sure you are only checking it when you want to process your email, not because you are bored and you want to feel productive.

Raise The Stakes

As far as I can tell, Stever is making this point in order to stem the flood of email from digital natives, who believe it is easier to send an email than to pick up the phone. So he instructs us to change our signature to include instructions to contact us by phone because we only check email once a day.

If my email is turned off (see above), then the dozens of messages from a digital native won’t reach me to interrupt my work.

Phone calls, however, will interrupt me. And I’d rather not bet my concentration on the hope that a digital native won’t call me.

Instead of telling them to call: keep your email closed. If an overload of messages from one person becomes a problem, you can tell them to keep all their questions until a face-to-face meeting (and schedule one as often as necessary, whether it is daily or weekly). Most of these items can be handled in a 15 minute meeting.

Tame Your Email

This is a summary point in Stever’s article. He points out that email forces us to attend to other people’s priorities.

I disagree. Once the email is in my box, I have a choice to interact with it or not. By checking my email at deliberate points, and processing it into a system
(inbox zero), I decide whether the item will interrupt my own priorities or not. And more often than not, they don’t.

Instead of attending to other’s priorities: have a system of prioritizing all your work. If someone comes up with something they need you to do, put it in the system and provide an estimate of when you will get to it. If it’s truly that important, they will either negotiate a priority change, or accept it. You’re still working on your priorities, and not allowing yourself to be puffed about with every breeze of a request.

Conclusion

In some cases, I think Stever missed the mark: deleting email wholesale, catching up on threads from the bottom, forcing inbox zero and raising the stakes. In others, I don’t think he went far enough: replying to all, checking email deliberately and changing your priorities can all be taken further.

Action Step

What do you think? Was he on the mark or off in left field? You can drop me an email or leave a comment.

Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash. Text Added.

You might need to get email off of your server. The first is space. If your company has quotas on how big your email boxes can be (and they all do), you might find yourself in a situation where you have no more room, but you need to hang onto emails for legal or documentation reasons. So what do you do?

So you can either go through each email, either printing it to paper or file, or you can do the easy method if your company uses Outlook. Today I’ll show you the easy way.

Email Archives

I have never figured out why so many companies are stingy when it comes to disk space on their email servers. Disk space is cheap, after all.

Now I know there are people out there who save everything. That isn’t necessary, and it shouldn’t be a reason to use this method. Clean up your email first.

But if you have a legitimate need to preserve email, such as for documenting processes and decisions, saving them off the server can free up space while still keeping the emails for you to access.

Email As Legal Grounds

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this method could be used to pull email off the server into a file, which could then be transported to another system or computer.

However, I do want to point out that email is generally considered company property, and it may or may not be legal to remove email from the computer systems the company owns and put it on another machine. I cannot be held responsible if you decide to follow this method for such ends.

Outlook To The Rescue

Most companies use Outlook. It’s an industry standard, and it’s been around for ages. No matter how old the Outlook is that your company uses, this will work. It may not be in the exact same place in the menus, but the functionality is there. If you can’t find the options where I say they are, Google it. Google will provide exact locations based on your program year.

Here are the steps:

Creating a Separate PST File

Outlook stores email in PST files. The default one is what you generally use, but you can set up other PST files and store them on your hard drive. You can copy or move any email to the PST file.

Copy The Emails

Once you have the PST file set up, copy over emails. You can arrange them in folders or just leave them all in one pile.

Disconnect the PST

Once you are done, you can close the PST in Outlook if you really don’t need to access them frequently. If you need to access those emails again, you can open the PST file and they are there.

I can’t really say whether closing or leaving it open is better. But you have to be aware that those emails won’t be accessible anywhere that can’t get to the PST file. So if you are using Outlook from a remote machine, you will not be able to access the file on your hard drive – any more than you could access a document you stored locally. If you need it from multiple locations, consider putting the PST file on the network.

The Video

I decided this would be best shown by video. So here is my Outlook 2010 setting up the files.
https://youtu.be/FJoLeGaWJ08

Summary

Using PST files to pull email out of your email server is a good way to archive them.

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You probably know that you have to hang onto certain paper documents for a given number of years. These documents are required by law, and only after a certain number of years of retention can you get rid of them. The same applies to email, though, which has been used in court cases. But how long do you have to keep the email from Great Aunt Edna talking about the snowstorm? That’s where setting up an email retention schedule comes in. You can clean your old email with email retention policies.

I get a lot of email every day. If I didn’t delete most of it outright, I would have overrun my email capacity years ago. But there are some things I need to hang on to for various reasons. I need to be able to reference all Girl Scout correspondence until the next membership year. I need to be able to refer to my Girl Scout training records forever. I need to hang onto tax receipts for 7 years. But what about the other? That’s where I set my retention rules. If I didn’t have them, “out of sight, out of mind” would definitely apply, and my mailbox would be unwieldly.

Disclaimer: Let me state outright I am not a lawyer, and I base this information on what I have found on the web. Research and use retention schedules based on your country’s laws, or consult a professional

Company Retention Times

All companies should have an email retention schedule. It’s a legal rule. If you have any questions about how long your email is retained, please contact your employer’s IT department. But know that your email is retained for many years.

Personal Retention Times

As a starting point, I found documents from two companies whose business is retention. The first one, Intradyn, specializes in email. The second, Shred-it, specializes in papeer documents. Both of these companies are US based, and follow US law.

Intradyn: Comprehensive Guide To Email Retention Policy

Figure out how long you need to keep your own email before disposing of it.

Deleting Email At The End of Retention

If you classify your email correctly at the outset, deleting email that doesn’t need to be retained is a snap.

Using Labels/Categories

You can set up your retention at the point of receipt to make things easier. I have a simple scheme: I mark things for permanent retention and deletion after a time.

In GMail, I use the label “PermRet” to indicate something that needs to be permanently retained. Anything that has to be retained to a date, I mark with the year: “Ret17”, “Ret18” etc. The digits represent the year in which something can be deleted

In Outlook, I use categories. Since I don’t like cluttering up my categories list, I use two: “PermRet” and “Retain”. Then I use the searches to help me figure out what has to be deleted from the Retain tag every year.

Using Searches to Find Old Email

You can use the search function to find old email to classify it.

In Gmail, use the Before search keyword (note the special format of the date: Year/Month/Day)

In Outlook use the Advanced search

Using Filters/Rules To Delete

Once you have your labels or tags set up, it becomes very easy to find those items for deletion. In Gmail you can make a search using the tag: keyword.

Outlook you can use the advanced search

Further Automation

There are ways to further automate this process using Google Scripts (Gmail) and VBA (Outlook). However, that is way beyond the scope of this article. If you are programmer-minded, you can find examples on how to locate email with specific dates and label/category combinations.

Summary

With a few simple searches and judicious application of labels/categories, you can set up your email to have a retention date. This will keep your mailbox cleaner, and make sure you only keep the important stuff.

Image by Beverly Pearl. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.

It’s almost reflexive. You pick up your phone and you immediately check your email. The question I want to look at today is about checking email too much…and a better way.

I’ve had a terrible email habit. I think it stemmed from FOMO, but I would check my email around 20 times a day. Waiting in line? Check my email. Cooking dinner? Check my email. Walking the dog? Check my email. And even though I would act on those emails immediately, by filing, deleting or sending to my task system, I knew that I was still taking far too much time with email. It had become a bad habit to constantly check.

What Happens When You Check Too Much

Email is a funny thing. It has expanded from an easier way to communicate into a way to have others push tasks onto you.

Think about the last few emails you received that you didn’t delete or file. That means you either have to respond or do something in response to the email. Ask yourself if you would have taken the same action if the person had asked you in person.

Think about this: if the woman at your kid’s school had asked you in the parking lot if you could make cupcakes for the end of the week, would you have said yes? Maybe, but you would have thought about it.

If it comes in an email, however, we lose two things: we lose that pause where we consider the task and decide what to do based on our current time; and we respond without considering the assumption that an email implies you will already do the task.

Email assumes we will comply, and without conscious effort, we do comply.

What Is Too Much

So often is too much?

The best way to judge is to ask yourself if you have time at the moment to take care of the email, either by filing, deleting, responding, or pushing to an outside system.

If you don’t have time to deal with the email — and by this I mean think about it and consider if you have time to do the tasks — don’t check it.

Email: The Electronic Child

If you have kids, you’ll understand this reference. Email is the kid tugging at your sleeve, constantly asking for something. And as any parent knows, if you spend all your time responding to that sleeve tugging, you do two things: you reinforce the behavior, and you get nothing else done.

Kids beg/nag because we let them. Email begs/nags because we let it. We let our minds engage with it, even without considering what we need to do.

10 and 2 (and 6)

So what’s a better way?

First of all, don’t check your email first thing. That is equivalent to letting a bunch of people ask you for things before you even had a chance to settle in and see where you are for the day.

I suggest picking set times to check your email.

I’m currently teaching my daughter to drive, and I remind her that she needs to have both hands on the wheel – 10 and 2. It’s a good time to check email as well. 10 lets you settle into your day before dealing with the tasks others are piling on; 2 lets you deal with anything truly urgent before you leave for the day. And I add in 6 for checking personal email.

Three times only instead of reflexive checking.

Summary

Save yourself blindly taking on things that others dump on you. Limit how often you check your email, and check it when you have the time to really think about the request. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Image by BuzzFarmers. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.

“I haven’t gotten to the email yet.” The woman’s voice was annoyed. I had called because I needed to know if she was able to come to speak to my Girl Scouts or not, something we had arranged two months before, and I had followed up with an email three weeks ago. “But I sent the email three weeks ago.” Her voice had angry now. “Listen, I have thousands of emails in my inbox. I can’t get to everything the minute it comes in.” I was stunned. I thanked her for her time, let her know that we would have to reschedule and hung up. Thousands of emails. And she was still trying to get to them all.

About a year later, I wandered over to my client manager’s desk. I had a changes to go into a release, and she hadn’t responded to the system emails asking for her approval. It was the first week of January, and the fix needed to be in the next week. “Oh, I deleted all my emails on January 2nd. I had almost 10,000, and I decided that I just needed to get rid of them because I wasn’t going to get through them.” And in the meantime, changes critical for the users were left undone as we scrambled to resubmit all the changes to the system.

So what should you do when your email is completely out of control? Ignore the incoming? Delete everything? Or something else? Today we will look at how to reset your email when you have lost control of your email inbox.

The Dangers Of Trying To Catch Up

So many people will keep trying to catch up on their email, even under the onslaught. But the truth is, if more is coming in than you are taking out, you will never be caught up, and the problem keeps growing.

Even working from the most recent doesn’t solve the problem. No matter where you start working, some email will be ignored, and emails will be left unattended.

The Dangers Of The Grand Delete

At the same time, deleting everything can remove important information.

This isn’t FOMO (fear of missing out) speaking. There are often legitimately important things in your email that you need to pull out. This could include receipts for taxes, registration information for conferences or exams, tickets or correspondence that needs to be preserved (more about this later this month). Email is considered legal information, and you can’t just delete it outright.

A Better Approach To Resetting Your Email

So there’s a better way to approach getting your email under control. It’s sort of a hybrid strategy that takes a multi-pass approach to weeding out the inbox.

Get It Out Of The Way

The first thing you need to do is get everything out of your inbox. But you won’t be deleting it. You’ll be putting it in a folder where you can deal with it. I suggest calling it “backlog” so you don’t forget what it is for.

This leaves your inbox to accept only the newest email so you can deal with the most current issues, while still giving you the opportunity to access your old email.

Search It

Next you will do some broad passes through the email.

First, find everything that has the word “unsubscribe” in it. All email that is sent from email broadcasts in the US is required to have a clear unsubscribe function. This is usually the word “unsubscribe”. So you will search your email, and delete everything that came from a broadcast.

Next, find everything that has “receipt” in it. All of these will be put into a folder you will call “receipts”. This allows you to keep anything that you may need for taxes. Also search for “contribution” and add that to the receipts.

Next, find all email where you are just CCed and not the recipient. These emails are generally meant for your information, but you can deal with them later. (In Gmail, this is simply cc:me) Put these into another folder called “CC”. Do this for all email you are BCCed on (in Gmail, bcc:me)

Next, pull everything that has an attachment into a folder. These might be unimportant, but chances are if someone took the time to send you a file, you need to look at it a little bit closer.

Lastly, make sure conversations are turned on. Most email programs have a way to show conversations or threads. This will group the email so that you can deal with it in related clumps.

Sort It

Your backlog should be substantially reduced now. The next thing you need to do is look at the various things shown by sorting the email.

Sort your email by date. How old is the oldest email? Is the oldest email read and just hanging out? Or is it unread? Delete as much of the oldest email as you can.

Sort your email by sender. Do you recognize everyone? See if you can delete email from people you’ve never heard of. (If you use Outlook, this is really easy – just click on the sender column header, but Gmail takes a bit more work to do this; Google it).

Bit By Bit

Now that the bulk of your email has been put aside, you need to go through the rest. Do it in 10- or 15-minute increments, and use a timer!

There are four possibilities for every email: file as reference material, take action outside of email, respond or delete. Don’t let any email under your mouse get skipped; process all as they fall.

Keeping Your Email Clean

So we’ve talked about getting out of the hole. But how do you stop falling into it to begin with? It’s by applying those four actions to every email that comes into your box.

The difference is that you can set up rules/filters to run on your current inbox to help keep it clean. You can use the same filters above to automatically file your email. For instance, you could have everything with an unsubscribe button go into a separate folder, and then clean that folder out once a week, either by reading or deleting.

Summary

As tempting as it is to keep working through an overwhelming inbox or deleting it outright, these methods aren’t good approaches. Instead, by putting it in its own folder, filtering out newsletters and other email, and then sorting it, you can reduce the input so it is manageable.

My EBook On Email Taming

Want a complete system on how to manage email? Check out my e-workbook, Taming the Gmail Dragon!

Image by thinkhere. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.

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Quote of the Week

“There are two kinds of people: 1) Inbox (0) and 2) Inbox (32,314)”

Musings

I want to tell you a story about a method of working. Jane has an inbox. People come by and put things on top of the pile that is in the inbox. Jane works hard to get the inbox empty, but that doesn’t happen often. She does have a method, though.

Jane pulls the top item out of the inbox and considers it. What does she need to do with it? She decides that she has to wait for another piece of information, and puts it aside. She grabs the next piece. It’s an invoice, so she turns to the computer and pulls up the three programs she uses to process invoices. Then she grabs the next item from the inbox. It needs to be filed, so she walks over to the department filing cabinet and files it.

She picks up the top item in her inbox. She’s waiting for an answer on this in her email, so she turns and checks her email. No answer, so she puts it aside.

Then Jane’s boss walks by. Julie wants to know what the project requirement that was sent earlier in the week was for…Jane hasn’t filed it. So Jane digs through her inbox and finds it. But instead of doing anything with it when Julie walks away, Jane puts it back in the inbox.

This keeps on. Jane gets about halfway through the stack before the end of the day. At that point she puts all those things she is waiting for answers on back on top of the inbox for tomorrow.

That would be a crazy way to work, wouldn’t it? It would make much more sense if Jane were to pull everything out of the inbox, and group it by what needs to be done. Then she batch enter the invoices. She could keep the things she is waiting for out of the inbox and not have to go through them every day.

It would be much more efficient if Jane didn’t work from her inbox.

And it may seem crazy way to operate a physical inbox…

…yet it’s the way most people treat their email inboxes.

Do not work from your inbox. Not physical, not email.

Want more details on how to do this? Check out my Taming The Email Dragon course.

That’s about it for this week’s edition. We’ll see what next week brings. Until then, be productive, be peaceful, and keep your balance.