How to actually deal with a ton of email in your inbox.
Coming back from a two-week vacation, I have a ton of emails in my inbox. This isn’t an uncommon situation, but my preferred inbox status is “under ten.” As this seems unfathomable to many people, I often get asked how I actually make this happen.
So here’s how I get my inbox into single digit territory:
- Sort my emails by date, with the newest being at the top.
- Read all my email from the top down, without replying to any of them. This way I have context for conversations and actually force myself to read everything.
- Then I go back through and reply/delete/archive/sort starting from the the bottom up.
- If I’m not going to reply to an email, I file or archive/delete it immediately. If I’m going to reply, I do so immediately.
- ONLY if it’s something that REQUIRES I wait to handle it at a later time/date, can it stay in my inbox.
- I give myself a time limit in which to do this (usually an hour) and don’t do anything else within that time period - no phone calls, no meetings, no web.
You’d be amazed at how much time and energy you can save by simply recognizing that so many of those old emails can be deleted because they’re A) not relevant anymore, or B) any reply should come in response a newer email in the chain. You’ll spend less time on email which, if we’re to be honest, ends up being a huge time-suck and stress point for all of us.
14 Notes/ Hide
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rickwebb reblogged this from spytap and added:
do, too, but what gets me is...“read this 10 page thing
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wakeuphappy reblogged this from spytap and added:
same strategy! Don’t know...stand to have hundreds
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andrewpettit said:
It’s incredible what a gratifying feeling zero’ing out your inbox can be. I do some of what you layout above, but I use the GTD method of labeling my emails as Follow-up/Hold/Read. Anything not labeled gets Archived or Deleted.
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meganomalous liked this
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nudawn said:
I go through the same process but I think its cute it only takes you an hour. If I’m out of the office a week it would take me a full eight hours to catch up on my inbox. Sometimes more.
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spytap posted this
