TechTips Vol II – Website Inbox Zero
If I’m going to stay with a December theme, and the software of the month was doit.im, the website of the month should relate. Do you have more than 1,000 items in your inbox, do you have more than 100, do you have more than 10, do you have more than 1? If so, you should really check out inbox zero.
Merlin Mann, the author of inbox zero is a knowledge resource for Task management and Email management. I don’t want to be redundant or attempt to plagiarize his material. Let me give a brief summary of what I’ve gotten out of it and recommend some key parts of the site.
My Take Away’s
- The inbox is like your physical mailbox at home or the office. Do you leave your mail in the mailbox or do you take it inside the house and open, sort, act on it? Do you leave birthday cards unopened, checks un-cashed, bills unpaid? No, I hope, so we should apply the same practices to our email inbox.
- Do not let email run your day, that’s the job of your task system, doit.im.
- Turn off auto notify, beeps, blurps, pings, pop-ups, etc. that distract you from the tasks at hand. This applies to your phone as well.
- Set a new habit to only check your email every 15, 20, 30 min, or even every 1 hr.
- Do not leave your email system open on a separate screen constantly staring at you?
- When you check your email, do something, just looking at it every X times per hour and not acting, will only distract your mind from the focused task at hand.
- Every X times per hour when you check your email, act on the easy items first.
- Delete
- Reply
- Forward
- or just Archive (if you need the data and not action is necessary)
- The more challenging items.
- Decide if you can deal with them at that moment or if they have to be dealt with (time sensitive).
- If the email can wait create a new folder or label (gmail users) called ToDo or ToReview. Place the emails that need to be sifted through, but not at the moment here.
- At the end of the day, every 2hrs, every 1hr, etc. Sort and act on the emails in the ToDo, ToReview section.
- Delete, Reply, Forward, Archive
- If there is an action item in the email, record the notes and task in doit.im. Then remove the email.
- Stay diligent with this system. It pays off in productivity and satisfaction, stress free, dividends.
Great, but I have 10,000 items in my inbox, and I am not going to sift through them all. What do I do?
- Create a new folder or label called inbox-archive or inbox-date, something
- Take all emails over a month, etc, old and move them there. If you have not dealt with them yet, you probably won’t start until you have good habits. You NEED a clean inbox to start good habits. Now go through the email under a month old and deal with them. You can go through the archive never, it’s an archive for reference.