How to manage email overload
Email is an essential communication tool used for work, personal and social communications. It's accessible, instant, easy to use, and keeps us connected to others. The average business professional receives 121 emails per day or 15 emails per hour. Can you imagine 121 pieces of mail in your mailbox at the front door? In just one day? Regardless of your inbox management strategy, leaving important messages to sit in your inbox alongside unimportant (or worse, spam) messages can create a host of other problems:
Decline in productivity
Panic or stress from missing messages
Wasted time searching for messages
Consequences of inaction
Imagine if we approached the inbox the same way we approach our postal mail. Maybe not checking it just once per day, or in my case, once every few days (thank you, Informed Delivery, for making my postal experience so much more efficient). But actually, take action on an email message immediately, and hit the delete button rather than just mark them as a read message. If you’ve ever heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, you understand the difference between important and urgent, unimportant and neither urgent nor important, you can easily respond to messages in your inbox without the worry that information will be missed or forgotten. If you’re still wondering where to start, here are four ways to clear your inbox clutter.
Eliminate junk immediately
Junk messages are unimportant and unurgent and should not comingle with your most important work. There are two ways to eliminate junk: hit delete or mark it as junk. Marking as junk will flag the email address as unwanted in your inbox and directly deposit future messages into the junk folder. Unsubscribing can have secondary consequences, and I only recommend it when you know the source.
Use folders
It is natural to hold onto messages for reference purposes; however, leaving them in your inbox is just creating a pile. It forces you to sort through them over and over again. It's essential to keep action items separate from reference items. Maybe it's a newsletter you want to read at a later date, or perhaps you delegated a task to a team member. Move those items into a sub-folder system within your inbox rather than leaving them to clutter your important and urgent messages.
Respond and eliminate
It’s easy to hit reply, type a message, and move to the next message. The problem is you left that message in your inbox, which requires your attention to review it again. Once a message has been acted upon, it should leave your inbox. File that message into a folder or delete it if no other action is needed. When you leave messages in your inbox that have already been processed, you waste time and take attention from what's important. Forcing you to rehash or reread emails over and over again. Read, respond and eliminate (or move).
Use the tools
If your motive for leaving messages in your inbox is to help you remember a task, follow up, respond, or some other action, you're not using it correctly. Examine your task management system outside of your inbox and identify a strategy to better manage your to-do's. There are hundreds of apps that integrate with email. When you can actively manage action items (or tasks) in a specific list, you can easily see what is important, and identify when an action should be taken. Platforms like Gmail, Outlook, and MS Mail often have the option of forwarding a message to a companion list app.
Using digital tools to help you streamline how you manage your messages will make you more productive. You can centralize important and urgent messages and eliminate the distraction of what is not important. If getting to inbox zero is a goal or objective this year, let me know. I can get you there!
