Too Much Email? How to Survive Your Inbox & Get Yourself Back in Order

[jrineakter]

Many knowledge workers work from a full email inbox. This often leads to seeing emails unnecessarily often, seeing them at the wrong time or searching for them. It is also difficult to do tasks smoothly if they are hidden in email. In this article you can read how to use your email inbox as a collection point, but work from your calendar and task list.

Do you also work from the inbox?
How often would you see an average email? Perhaps the first time when it comes in. Especially if you still have all kinds of notifications turned on, you will not easily miss a new email. Perhaps again when you really start working on your emails. If the email is not that easy to work through or you are short on time, you may unread croatia telegram number list the email or put a flag on it. If you then start doing some emails 'that still need to be dealt with', you will see that email again. Or if you need an email in between for a meeting or a phone call, you will also see other emails passing by. And if you can only finish the email after you have received input from someone else, that email cannot be ignored either.

It could be that you see certain emails seven or eight times. And sometimes 'seeing' is not as neutral as it sounds. 'Seeing' can mean that you have feelings about it like 'Aargh, that one has to be done too!' or 'I have to do something with that now'.

How do you choose what to do?
If you have a large backlog of work in your inbox, how do you choose what to do? Especially if there are some emails with a subject line that is not very informative. How do you weigh the possible actions from the email against your own thought-up actions on your to-do list? This often leads to an hour (or evening) of 'doing email'. You start with the first and get to the thirtieth email. Continue tomorrow! But who says that emails 31 and 32 were actually the most important or urgent?

And if you want to make some calls, how do you find the emails that contain a call action? You can label or categorize or flag emails, that helps. Otherwise you have to scroll through the entire email list. And then it may be that you only know after rereading that email what exactly you want to achieve with that call.

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Decide and then do it
What would it be like if you saw each email once and only saw it again when you needed it? For some emails, that is never. And for emails with a task in them, for example, you only see them when you are going to do that task. See them once, make a decision and tidy up. Your inbox (or your inboxes, of course) is then a collection point, where your emails come in. And once or a few times a day you process the newly received emails. You start with the newest and each email goes from your inbox to a place that fits the meaning of that email, so to archive, task list, agenda, etc.

Inbox Zero
Many knowledge workers are already in the habit of organizing emails, perhaps you too, and work according to the so-called Inbox Zero . Not that the inbox has to be empty all day. That would be a full-time job! Inbox Zero means that you are not focused on the inbox and you are not working from the inbox. This prevents incoming emails from taking up a large part of your time and attention and that working through emails becomes a large part of your work.

This also means that you do not deal with the content of the first email, but only do the tasks from emails when you have processed all the new emails and therefore have an overview of everything you can do. For example, create that 'interesting invitation to speak' as a task and do not answer it immediately. And also only do 'that annoying email that entails all kinds of research' if you think that is the best choice. Only if you can do something immediately and quickly, do you deal with it immediately. Two minutes is often mentioned as a target time. Gone is gone.