The email that broke the camel’s back
November 2nd, 2010
Are you overwhelmed by the number of emails you get every day?
I’ve heard that many people are.
One of my professors emailed the class today, apologizing for not having explained one assignment clearly enough. He said he used to send more emails, but he got complains from students saying things like “Why should my mailbox be cluttered with trivial messages like this?”
This kind of made me laugh, because I think those students are ridiculous. It takes all of 10 seconds to scan an email, decide it doesn’t pertain to you, and hit delete. Hardly clutter, if I do say so myself.
However, I am going to make an educated guess and say that those individuals are those who never delete or archive anything, and have > 10,000 emails in their inbox. I am also going to guess that those are the people that complain about how overwhelmed they are by the amount of email they get every day. I am also going to guess that those are the people that spam entire mailing lists, requesting to be removed from the list.
As I said in an email back to the professor, in this day and age information overload is pretty much a given. We need to learn to deal with it sooner or later. Personally, I choose sooner.
My personal solution, as you probably know if you’ve been reading this blog, is GTD. If you don’t want to adopt the whole lifestyle, Merlin Mann’s excellent Inbox Zero series will get you up to speed on using GTD to beat the crap out of your inbox.
Here’s one article he wrote that I was reading today:
Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero
However, there are tons more on the site, feel free to browse around.
For the lazier of my readers, here are the two basic steps to Inbox Zero:
1. Process your inbox to zero every time you read it.
That means no more idly browsing your inbox for interesting emails. Start from the top, open each email, and do whatever needs to be done. Reply, add an item to your to do list, archive, delete, whatever gets that email out of your life. Then move on to the next. By the time you’re done, you should have *nothing* in your inbox. (If you think this sounds hard, I would love to hear why in the comments)
2. Check your inbox less often
This is a tough one for me. I still find myself leaving gmail open (it’s open as we speak, actually) but the goal is to check it maybe 3 times a day. That’s down from (literally) over 100 times a day.
If you are able to complete those two steps with any measure of success, I commend you. The rest of us will get there someday!
So how about you? Do you practice Inbox Zero? Have you ever even heard of Inbox Zero? Leave a comment below, I would love to hear from you!
Nice post, Cory. I agree completely, as I said in my email. I also try to do the “Inbox Zero” practice, though I never labelled it as such. I think it’s just my natural inclination to use the inbox as a workflow, and so when I see it’s empty, I think of my workflow as being done.
The one thing you didn’t mention that I find very useful is filtering. I use Gmail, and one feature I make particular use of is the labels. This is basically a tool to make it easier for me to find emails later, by categorizing them. I guess I sort of use it like tagging. But I also use it so that I can group my new emails into priority groups. A general mailing list from the school is a lower priority, and I get more email from it, so I created a filter that applies a specific label, and skips the inbox. In my Gmail view, I can see that I have (50) or (32) new emails in that label, but I take care of emails that are in my main inbox, or in one of my higher priority labels first, before doing the scan and archive that I use on 90% of the general school emails.
Anyway. Great post.
Thanks, Isaac.
I use Gmail, but deliberately use labels and filters very sparingly. My reasoning is that if I have another place to go to check for new emails, it’s essentially another inbox. I like to minimize the places I have to go to find new stuff. If I ever filter anything out of my inbox, I also have it marked as read (for example, “deal” emails such as Marcos Pizza or Borders coupons). That way I don’t compulsively check my deal folder, but the coupons are there when I need them.
However, that’s just the best process I’ve found that works for me. I’m not recommending it to everyone; if filtering school emails out of your inbox works for you, and you can stay on top of multiple inboxes, more power to you!