Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 1

If you leave messages in your Inbox, you are insane. Okay, there I’ve said it.

Every message left in your Inbox adds psychic weight to you. And this weight can be awfully heavy over time. On average, information workers (that’s you) get over 20,000 messages in a year (see Scary Email Math ). If you leave even a small percentage of your messages in your Inbox, you can easily accumulate thousands of them. I have personally seen one with over 12,000 messages. That’s a lot of weight!

So . . . what can you do?

1. Sort your message in a way that makes sense to you.
2. If you have more than a couple of screen pages, deal with multiple messages at a time (until you make a significant dent in them). If you only have a few screen pages, start at the top and work to the bottom.
3. Block out as many distractions as possible and set aside time to process your emails (20 – 30 minutes is good).
4. Delete all the ones you possibly can.
5. File the ones you need or may need to look at later but that don’t require action. Don’t hesitate, if you think you might need it later, file it. Don’t waste much time deciding to file or delete, just file it. You can always delete it later.
6. Forward all the ones that belong to someone else. I also BCC myself on these if I need to add them to a Waiting For list. I know that I have a copy in my Sent items but I tend to forget they are in there. BCCing works like magic for me because it ends up as another message in my Inbox.
7. Do all the ones you can do in 2 minutes or less.
8. Now, your stack should be reduced by well over half. But . . . you now have the ones that will require more work.

Ok . . . so what to do with the ones that are left?

• If they are ones that really need to be done now (depending on who they are from or what needs to be done) then do them.
• The rest of the messages need to be moved to the calendar (if they have to be done at a specific time) or to the task list (everything else).
• Also, I like to prefix message that require only one action (Action items) with “A:”. Those that are projects (require more than one action) with “P:”. I take the messages that need Follow Up (a.k.a. Waiting For) and prefix them with “F:”.
• Your Inbox should now be empty!

Hey . . . what about Someday / Maybe items?

I find that Someday / Maybe for me becomes a black hole. I put them in there and I never revisit them. What I do now is decide when I want to revisit them (usually this is 3 – 12 months away). I use Speed Dating to quickly create a task 6 months out to look at the item then. I found that when I was using a “normal” Someday / Maybe list I couldn’t trust that I would visit it when I need to. This way I only have two buckets for action items of all kinds: Calendar and Tasks.

If you are on Outlook user (97 – 2007), download 7 Secrets of Light Speed Email Management, to see short cuts on how to make this happen.

I once used this system to process 2 days worth of email in 10 minutes (Scout’s Honor!).

See also:

• Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 2

• Email – Stop the Insanity – Part 3

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