It’s a fact: email isn’t going anywhere. And the number of email messages we receive will only grow. In 2010, there were 294 billion emails sent daily, up almost 50 billion from the previous year. With so many incoming messages, it has become a real challenge to avoid being distracted by the urge to view or work on new emails rather than working on truly important matters.
Despite all of the inbox management tools on the market today, and Google's Priority Inbox is definitely one of the best, many people still have the propensity to leave items in their inboxes as a way to remind them of upcoming tasks or just to keep them handy. This can be self-defeating behavior.
Maintaining a cluttered inbox is a productivity killer
Why? First, that cluttered inbox is a source of stress the minute you open your inbox. It essentially shows you everything you are not going to get done that day. Second, it is a source of distraction, because when people scroll up and down seeking tasks to select, they inevitably open the short easy ones, instead of focusing on the priority items.
Shift the way you view and use your inbox
Picture your email inbox as a Postal Service mailbox. The Postal Service delivers our mail to that mailbox, we pull the mail out of the mailbox, sort through it, throw half of it away, and put the rest in piles, most of which will be dealt with later. What we don't do, is put letters back into the mailbox, to be sorted through again tomorrow. Why not think of our email inboxes the same way?
Differentiate between working and sorting email
When people groan upon the suggestion of cleaning out their inboxes, my guess is that they are thinking they must work on or handle every item in it. When you go into your inbox with the mindset of sorting the messages -- not working them -- the task becomes much more tolerable and doable! It becomes a matter of dragging and dropping messages into folders to be handled later just as you do with your postal mail. In Gmail, you can create two labels: Action A, and Action B. A is for the important items, B for the less important. And once you’ve labeled a message, you can archive it and easily search for it later.
Setting reminders is the key
Every time you drag and drop a message into an action folder, or label it in Gmail, decide at that moment when you will view the item again to work on it. These reminders become a critical part of each day's daily planning, and relieve you from having to scroll up and down either your inbox or your action folder to decide what to work on next.
In Gmail, this is easy. Create a corresponding Task for each item you label, and assign it the date you plan to work it. These tips and more are included among the "12 Steps to Curing Your E-mail E-ddiction" contained in my book, "Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence" (available on our website or on Amazon,) and are further explained on our blog at http://InboxDetox.com/blog.
Why should you want a clean inbox?
Simple. An empty inbox is the result of managing email well. It doesn’t mean that you’ve worked every message, but it does mean that you have sorted every message into a folder or given it a label that allows you to retrieve it when the time comes. By sorting or labeling email to Action A or B and setting a task reminder for when you plan to return to it, you will go a long way towards managing your inbox, rather than having it manage you.
So, here’s to lookin’ at your (empty) inbox!
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