Taking Control of Your Email Inbox

bottomline — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:50:38 +0000

I get hundreds of emails every day, yet I am able to effectively and efficiently deal with them in 30-60 minutes a day. This wasn’t always the case. My inbox used to be an unmanageable mess that wasted hours of my time and consequently cost the company money. I was able to regain control of the inbox monster with some principles I learned from Getting Things Done. Here are a 3 things you can do to take control of your inbox…

1. Limit your inbox visits. For some of us, the compulsion to open our inbox just to check it is as strong as a nicotine crave, and can prove to be cancerous to our productivity. Frequent inbox visits break your work flow and the frequent transitions unnecessarily lengthen the time it takes to get anything done. Instead of succumbing to the email urges, discipline yourself to open your inbox 3 times a day. For example, try once in the morning, once mid-day and once at the end of the day.

2. Don’t check your email, process your email. Each time you open your inbox process each message. For every message you have several options…

Delete it – I put this first because this action more often than not is forgotten. This should be your default. If you’re not sure if you’ll need it later, it’s not that important, DELETE IT!
Save it – only do this when you know you’ll need it later, and only save it in an archive folder, not in your inbox.
Do it now – if the email requires action that you can do in 2 or 3 minutes (or less), do it now.
Put on the To Do List – if the email requires action that will take more than a few minutes put it on the to-do list. Be careful not to trade a cluttered inbox for a cluttered to-do list. The To Do list is for important actionable items, not for email messages you don’t feel like reading now.
Reply/Forward – Don’t waste your time or your recipient’s time with long drawn out emails, make every email meaningful and concise. Try using the 5 Sentence technique, which means keeping all email responses to 5 sentences or less.

For 3, 4 and 5 make sure you follow up and delete or save it. Don’t leave anything in your inbox.

3. Save some time by filtering emails the end up in the same place every time. I get a number of notifications and reports emailed to me that I need to save for records but don’t need to read. For example, payment receipts for online purchases, Paypal and banking transaction notifications. For these I have set up rules in outlook (or you can use filters in most webmail services) that automatically send these messages to my archive folders.

I think you’ll find that if you follow these three practices you’ll find yourself reclaiming some sanity, and have more time to spend developing your business and improving your bottom line.

The Bottom Line Vine » GTD

Taking Control of Your Email Inbox