Inbox Zero
THOUGHT
It’s not unusual to have hundreds or thousands of email in your inbox. Crowded email inboxes are hardly even news anymore; it’s barely even worthy of writing about. However, it’s a constancy in our business communications, and not until Cal Newport is in charge and we can all do away with email as he suggests, we’re stuck with it in the meantime.
Having only a handful of unactioned emails at any time puts me in a marvelous state of mind. I’ve only had the pleasure a few times in my career; probably I can count them on one hand. And so that’s says something.
There isn’t a magic prescription; there isn’t even a failure-proof method I can provide here that will help you achieve Inbox Zero. It’s just hard work. It just takes an excessive amount of focus to power through and deal with the clutter.
EXAMPLE
I’ve just finished a battle with over 500 emails in my inbox. More would be a better story, sure, but this is me, and I’m not going to exaggerate.
It took six hours spread over two days. Fortunately, I had the focus and the drive to get through them. And the time, space, and ability. It is never an easy battle. And the hard reality is, even after those six hours, it doesn’t mean all the work associated with them is done.
REALISATION
In tackling the swamp this round, I realised that it’s essential to be in the right frame of mind, in the right mood, to be able to do the task without resenting it. It’s been on my to-do list (or rather, a block in my calendar; I don’t use a to-do list anymore) — it’s been there for at least two months. So it’s not like I’m particularly disciplined in my achievements. But every time I moved that time-block another day or another week, it was a tacit reminder that it was still a task I had to do.
Eventually, the stars aligned, I was in the right mood, AND I had the time and space to clear the clutter.
There’s no magic strategy: I read them, sorted them, opened and parked them, re-sorted them, filed them and deleted them. It’s just a slog: lots of time spent reading and deciding what to do with them.
The only trick I can offer, which I do believe makes a difference, is the effort to convert remnant emails — the one that has work associated with it -into an activity on the calendar.
TAKE AWAY
Converting emails into a task is a game-changer for me. Every email that requires an activity: a phone call, a solid reply, a comment on something I have to read — gets converted into a task in the calendar. I create a new item, copy-paste the email into it, give it an action-based subject (“call Shirley about report”, or “Read and reply”). The other trick I have is my calendar is in 15-minute blocks, not the default 30 minutes. Fifteen-minute blocks is another game-changer because I can do many emails and administrative type tasks in 15 minutes — in fact, I’ll hazard a guess that most can’t be done in less than 15mins, taking into account the ‘switching’ effort needed between tasks.
But the takeaway is: copy your email into an event on the calendar. It gives that task the additional dimension — the most crucial dimension — of time allocation.
