Ten handy tips to build your inbox-fu.
Aversion calls for action.
That’s the moral of the story in yesterday’s post on countering aversion. Because that post was about avoiding e-mails, my inbox has been the focus of my attention and action since then.
As I was thinking about all the ways you could attack an overloaded inbox, I started sharing some of my thoughts on Twitter. The feedback was excellent, and the process gave me a handy way to collect ideas in one place on the fly — I grouped them using the hashtag #inboxfu.
In hopes that these thoughts will be helpful to YOU, here are ten of the tactics I suggested:
- “The Dose” — Highlight & open any block of ten messages, leave them open & rotate to them until they’re all acted upon.
- “The Rule of Ten” — Start with oldest 10 messages in inbox. Do nothing else until you delete, file, or delegate ONE. Repeat with next 10.
- “Four Corners” — Permanently take care of the oldest, newest, least important, and most important e-mails in your inbox.
- “A to Z” — Start at the beginning. Go thru EVERY.SINGLE.MESSAGE in your inbox. Feel disgust. File/delete/answer in great batches.
- “Beat the Clock” — Set a timer for 5 minutes. Eliminate as many e-mails as you can. Track results & try to top yourself.
- “Lifeboat” — If you could save only ONE message from your inbox, which one would it be? Deal with that one permanently.
- “Life Is Too Short” — If you could banish ONE message from your inbox, which one would it be? Deal with that one permanently.
- “Categories” — Re-sort inbox by any category (From, Subject, attachments, . . . ) you don’t normally use. Whittle accordingly.
- “Show Me the Money” — Pick the one e-mail that has the highest monetary impact — the most budget / revenue / cost / etc. Handle it.
- “Bottleneck” — Eliminate the one pending e-mail that obstructs the most other projects / e-mails / conversations / tasks.
For extra credit, I did each of these as I put it onto this list. Even though I was already down to the last 40 or so nitty-gritty e-mails, and even though many more flowed in during the course of the day, I ended up with just 20 messages in my inbox — and produced a healthy stack of work while I was doing it.
Tomorrow: applying more bits of inbox-fu to those last, stubborn items that have so far resisted eradication.
What’s your best trick for carving down your inbox?
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Image by GGuillaume, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
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9 Comments so far
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Why not set up some filters and remove the mails accordingly. It gives best choice of which mails you can look into. what say?
Good point, Krishna. I do use filters — some on my Outlook-based work account, many more on my personal Gmail account — but they only go so far.
It’s one thing to handle, say, all your Twitter notifications in one batch. (I’m a big fan of batch processing.) But plenty of the e-mails I get need individual handling, because there’s something in them that requires particular thought or a judicious response.
So, even when I *do* use filters, at some point I get down to the work that must be done “by hand.” You?
I set up rules with appropriate messages sent to folders (I use the iMail app) for all of my clients, my volunteer gigs, HARO, twitter (what is with these mass follows lately?), financial stuff, and, one folder I call “news” which has a rule for every newsletter that I get. The last one is key because I usually don’t have to act on what is in there. If need be, I can go through there and delete them all in one fell swoop, if I have time, I read them. Thus, most of the stuff in the “In” box is either from someone new, or something I can throw away.
Sounds great, Deb. I have similar filters set up for Twitter, listservs, etc. — the messages are there when *I* want them, but meanwhile they’re not cluttering up my inbox.
Tim, exactly. And, for someone like me who loses things, they are in a place where I can find them. I also use saved searches to help weed through those folders.
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