Is your email inbox filled with hundreds of messages? Do you often worry that you may have forgotten about something buried in your inbox? Do you wonder how it would feel to have zero messages in your inbox? Does this sound like an impossible dream? It's not! Follow these simple steps, and you, too, can achieve a "zero inbox." Believe me, it's worth trying at least once just to experience how good it can feel.
An empty inbox is one of the principles of performance excellence recommended by organizational gurus David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) and Mark Hurst (author of Bit Literacy).
Email overload is counterproductive, because it causes people to open and read the same messages again and again. Says David Allen, "Scanning an email and leaving it in your inbox because it's not as important as other emails at the moment creates double reading, double thinking, and double decision-making (not to mention the nagging it creates in the psyche in the meantime)."
As Mark Hurst says, "Incoming email has the same shelf life as Chinese takeout does in your refrigerator. After a day or two, it starts to get funky... No message belongs in the inbox."
What do Allen and Hurst recommend as the best way to counteract email overload? Empty the inbox at least once a day.
If that sounds impossible, remember that removing emails from your inbox doesn't mean doing all the work described in them; it just means moving them to the right place, like a to-do list, so you can work on them once the inbox is empty.
No matter how many messages you have in your inbox, getting to zero is always a possibility. (Hurst once helped someone who had 150,000 messages.) Start the induction process by sorting your messages by subject and deleting long series of emails on the same conversation thread. Then, sort by either sender or date. If there's an action associated with an email, file it in a "to do" folder, if there's not, then either delete it (recommended) or file it in a reference folder. When you get to zero, do a victory dance. Trust me, it will feel amazing.
Finally, here are two additional strategies you can use to vaccinate yourself against future cases of email overload:
1. Target the inflow
Are you sure that all of the emails currently landing in your inbox really should still be coming to you? Eliminate as much of the inflow as possible that really doesn't belong, and you'll be better able to sort through what does.
2. Use the two-minute rule (one of David Allen's best practices)
Do not file an email into your to-do system without at least spending a minimal amount of time to assess if it really needs to go there. Remember, if you can take care of the email in two minutes or less, then don't file it, just do it!
Lisa Bosley
PAICR Advisory Board Member
lbosley@aninvestor.com
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