If you’re like many people, you use your email inbox as your calendar, to-do list, tickler file, filing cabinet and more. Which of these is the correct use? NONE OF THEM!
Your email inbox should be a temporary storage area until you can take action on the item. Would you believe that I currently have zero emails in my inbox? It’s true! I process emails twice a day and make sure they’re all taken care of before I move on. Items I can’t take care of right away go on my (separate) to do list or on my calendar for later consideration.
I use David Allen’s great system, outlined in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, to accomplish this. His system has totally changed my life and I use many of his tips to zero out my inbox daily. If you don’t have time for the whole book, check out this overview of the system, which offers some great links to additional online resources you might want to explore.
Okay, so how do YOU accomplish a zeroed out inbox? Well, the first step depends on where you are currently. Take a look at every email inbox you have. If you have over 500 messages in an inbox, I recommend you declare email bankruptcy for this address and start over. Is this rude? Maybe, but it’ll give you a fresh start. If you have between 100 and 500 messages, I suggest you move everything but the last week of email into “Archive” and get ready to work through the past seven days. If you have under 100 messages, consider yourself lucky! Set aside about three hours in the next week to process them using the system discussed next.
Check out this interesting talk by 43 Folders creator Merlin Mann, where he advocates turning every email into an immediate action: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer or Do. His system is heavily based on Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, so it all fits together neatly. The talk is about an hour but is worth your time– in fact, you’ll probably save that hour immediately once you implement his system!
