Few things are consistent from office to office as the complaining about email. “I get 200 emails a day; how do you expect me to get work done.” Some of you may be laughing at only 200, others are complaining about 40 emails. The problem is rarely the volume of email. It instead is that most people don’t know what to do with the email they receive.

There are sites out there that recommend only checking email three times a day (I agree). However, if you don’t know how to handle your email, it won’t matter how frequently or infrequently you check it. When you finish checking email and you still have two thousand or twenty emails in your inbox, you still haven’t handled your email.

Your inbox is for receiving email; not storing it.

It is called an inbox, not a file cabinet. Stop thinking you can store email in your inbox because it is easier to search for it there. First, you don’t ever know how to find it. Second, all those emails just makes you numb to everything in there. Third, searching doesn’t work well well enough to justify your numbness to the items in inbox. If you really need to search, most programs allow you to search all folders. If you have an inbox with 2000 emails in it that you are keeping for when you may need to reference them, how much attention are you going to give to the one that came in today? Probably not very much. It is just one of 2001 emails, all carrying equal weight in your psyche.

email

If it is in your inbox, you need to do something with it.

Whether you admit this to yourself or not, this is how your brain is treating your inbox. There are three categories of things in your inbox and they all require different handling.

1) Action. You need to do something with this email. You may need to email a file back, look something up, or there may be direct tasking for you from your boss. In any event, you need to do something. You can do it immediately (if it is quick enough), transfer it to your task management system, or put an “Action” category/label on it dump it into a folder for future action. Any of these moves it from “in” and into “done” or “tracking”. Regardless, it is now out of your inbox.

2) Trash. The “delete” or “Del” is asking for you to push it. You don’t keep trash from dinner three weeks ago in your kitchen. Why are you keeping trash email from three weeks ago in your inbox? If you are scared of this, you can create a folder and call it “2-week reference” and dump all your trash email in there. You just need to clean it out every two weeks or it will start gnawing at your psyche again. Either way, the email message is no longer in your inbox.

3) Reference. These are for things that have no action right now, but may at some later date or you may want to refer to sometime in the future. A copy of your organization’s new policy on promotions or a list of useful phone numbers fall into this category. Create a folder or series of folders for these. You may decide to have one labeled “admin” for all your organization’s policies. Having one for each project you are working on works out well, too.

Your inbox is now empty

Okay, you just got a new email in just now. Feel free to handle it now or ignore it and start working through your next action list. What is the most important thing you can be doing right now?

How many actions are awaiting for you in your inbox? Could you find them if you needed to?

Additional Resources