I used to dread looking at my email inbox.
After all, it’s someone else’s to-do list for me! The problem wasn’t that I had thousands of emails to look at (email bankruptcy easily takes care of that, as discussed at the end of this episode). The problem was that I kept all unacted-upon emails in my inbox. Sound familiar? It’s the equivalent of having a single folder that says ‘stuff.’
Why was this a problem?
Every time I opened my email, I had to spend time and energy deciding whether to act on any particular item. It was just a little bit of attention, but it added up.
Low-hanging fruit isn’t the issue
It’s easy to delete (or archive) a spammy or irrelevant email. But what about all the other items? The most common action is to leave them in your inbox unfiltered, which creates clutter. Clutter is inefficient and, from personal experience, leads to things getting missed and anti-joy.
I’ve tried lots of different systems to get to ‘inbox zero’
I got partway there with the Getting Things Done method of do, defer, decide, delete, and the 2-minute rule. Partway didn’t cut it because some emails would sit for weeks if not months.
The revelation came with an email system addressing that not all emails are the same
The common approach is to treat all emails as if they have an equal voice at the table.
They don’t.
Here’s a screenshot of my inbox just before writing this newsletter.
The key principles of this system
When opening my inbox, I either archive the email immediately or filter/sort it into one of these three buckets (the names aren’t important, but the concepts are):
- Action items – priority emails that need a response or action from me
- Awaiting reply – I’m waiting on someone else’s action but don’t want to forget about it (I have responded and am waiting for someone else’s action before the loop can be closed)
- Read-through – when I have the time, I’ll read through at my leisure (newsletters, blog posts, articles, etc)
- Straight to archive – I never decide whether to delete or archive, I just archive. Why is that the case? If I had to think about whether to delete or archive, it would be a minor decision, but it would add up after doing it 100,000 times.
After sorting
- I respond to the action items
- If necessary, I send reminders for ‘awaiting reply’ emails
- Two days a week, I take my time with the read-through emails
A step by step how to guide
The video explains how to set it up in granular detail. The video (HT Jeff Su) is about 15 minutes, and then it will take about an hour to get your new email system up and rolling. This is an extraordinary magnitude return on time investment.
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