Are you a fan of “Inbox: 0?” Or would you rather keep every email you’ve ever received in the Inbox? No matter which camp you belong to, one thing is for CERTAIN.
Professionals are overwhelmed with email.
Some professionals are reactive to email notifications and they let those pull them away from current tasks. Others are glued to their email Inboxes all day long and get little else accomplished.
Some professionals let the Inbox build up and then they spend a lot of time scrolling and searching to find emails, attachments and information—wasting precious time, energy and effort, and reducing productivity.
If you review email as it comes in and you reply to, forward or delete as much of it as you can, that’s great and it might seem like you’re “keeping up” with email.
However, if you let ANY email STAY in the Inbox, you’re not actually “keeping up.”
You’re only letting THOSE emails BUILD up, because you’ve missed a critical step in the email process. It’s the FINAL step: getting emails OUT of the Inbox.
If you have a backlog of email, you will eventually pay the price in lost time, energy and effort. You are probably familiar with the scrolling and searching that must be done as you look for information related to tasks, emails, appointments, information, meetings, contacts, attachments and more. When these searches take too long, that’s time you’ll never get back.
Or worse, you’re looking for flagged emails. This is a HUGE waste of your precious time, because you know you have to revisit these emails… but you’re not sure exactly why. Not until you read or review them again. So, that means you’re wasting time re-reading emails you’ve already seen, but couldn’t do anything with.
Compound all of this with the never-ending worries that something has been missed, lost or forgotten, such as tasks, follow ups, events, opportunities or deadlines. And this can easily make your stress go off the charts.
Some people ask, “Who cares about an empty Inbox?” And maybe you’re wondering that, too. Here’s my answer…
An empty Inbox is POWERFUL.
Once you’ve moved emails OUT of the Inbox—and into the various other places I’ll explain in a minute—you will have an amazing level of clarity of tasks and information.
This kind of achievement—and the awareness it brings—is incredibly valuable. It helps you to use your time more efficiently and effectively. It helps you work more productively and it lets you make meaningful progress ELSEWHERE—outside of the Inbox. Plus, a clear Inbox gives you wonderful peace of mind, which helps to lower the stress and overwhelm caused by overflowing email.
There are MANY benefits to having empty email Inbox on a continuous basis. Here are just a few…
- Clarity: You will be 100% aware of everything that’s has arrived in your Inbox. You’ll know exactly what you have received, what you have kept, where it is and what actions you need to take now. Nothing has been missed, lost or forgotten.
- Control: You will know ALL of the tasks you are responsible for—at least those coming from email! There are more than TEN difference sources of tasks in your workday. Email is only one of them. If you centralize your tasks in a digital Task List, you can more easily and effectively plan and prioritize tasks from email with all of your other tasks. You will also have more control over your time, as you’re spending less of it on email and more of it elsewhere.
- Confidence: You will be able to find what you need when you need it without wasting any time. You’ll be confident you’re pursuing your MOST important tasks and that you’re on top of your work. You will also be better prepared for meetings and you can have ready answers for those who may ask you questions.
- Saved time: You don’t have to waste any time looking for emails, tasks, attachments, contact information, e-documents, or information of any kind.
- Increased efficiency and productivity: with less time spent looking for things in the Inbox, you can use your time more effectively for planning, prioritizing and accomplishing tasks and moving projects forward instead.
- Less stress and more peace of mind: No more worries about what might have scrolled off the screen and been missed, lost or forgotten. Plus, with such awareness of where you are on tasks and where all of your information is located, you will be able to make much faster progress each day with less stress.
Here are the STEPS I recommend to get your Inbox DOWN and ultimately to ZERO. You will do these at the same time, but for the purposes of explaining them, I have broken them out into two individual steps.
Step 1: Make Decisions Quickly and Often
Anything that arrives in an Inbox should go through a decision-making process and then be moved into another location, or be archived or deleted.
There are only three questions to ask and three categories in which emails will go:
- Reference: is this information useful for future reference? It could be information within the email, one or more attachments, or the email itself.
- Action: does this email create a task or follow up for me?
- Delete: if there are no action steps and the information isn’t useful in the future, will this email be archived or deleted?
Keep making decisions so information and tasks don’t stall in your email Inbox, ensuring your productivity won’t stall either.
Step 2: Move It Fast
One of the major road blocks that stops people from making decisions about what to do with their email or the information within is WHERE to put it.
You can’t move emails out until you have places to put things. So, you have to have locations or systems set up and ready to receive information or tasks, and when you do, THEN you can move email out of the Inbox faster and easier.
When you have locations in which to put information and tasks, the decision-making process is easy: “This goes here… that goes there…” and so on. Then you can empty your Inbox and use it as it was intended: as an Inbox for bringing email IN.
Here are examples of the kinds of locations or systems that must be established and ready to receive information…
- An e-document library where you can save not only e-documents you create, but also attachments from email. You can also save the email itself. This library could be in your hard drive, a shared drive or a location in the cloud.
- Email folders for saving emails. But make sure your list isn’t too long! A screen view of major category folders is what you’re aiming for.
- File drawers or file cabinets for saving physical documents you need to keep as a hard copy.
- Contact system or a CRM for saving contact information.
- A digital Calendar for saving appointment, event, call or meeting information.
- A digital Task List for planning and prioritizing tasks. When an email requires action or follow up, be sure to add it to your centralized, digital Task List.
- Archive or Deleted Items folder for emails that will not be useful to you in the future and they do not contain any action steps, tasks or follow-ups. Just be sure to follow your company’s Records Retention Guidelines before archiving or deleting email.
You may also have other systems your company of department is using to store other information. This could be another location in which you save valuable information.
Once you’re able to move emails out of the Inbox and into other (better!) systems or locations, you’re on your way to an EMPTY Inbox. And this is good news, because those systems are MEANT for managing those types of information. Email is NOT best managed while it’s still sitting in the Inbox.
After you get to zero in the Inbox, you won’t have to worry about email build-up anymore. Although, yes, it’s going to keep rolling in. However, when you process email back to zero once or twice a day, you’re free to focus on accomplishing tasks and moving projects forward. Then you can toggle back and forth between getting tasks completed and processing email back to zero for alternating periods of time throughout the day.
When you have a PROCESS for managing email—meaning you have a place for everything and you exercise good, consistent decision making—you can get email OUT of your Inbox faster and easier.
You can feel good about the outcomes of your efforts, too, because as stated earlier, there are a LOT of benefits to an empty Inbox. And keeping up with it is easy after you’ve reached zero for the first time.
If you’re ready for the productivity and peace of mind that an empty inbox brings, follow the easy steps outlined above so you can focus on being more efficient and productive with your time. Because I’m pretty sure you’d rather NOT be spending ANY more time in your email Inbox than absolutely necessary.
Plus, you can enjoy an empty Inbox that says, “There are no items to show in this view.” Ahhhh… freedom.
