Taking Charge of your Inbox

That I should even be writing this is a mark of the way email can take over one’s life. But it does, and not just because people are emailing us all the time, but because we love the little buzz of attention and (sometimes) accomplishment that answering emails gives us (and, I think, we have a weird subconscious sense of obligation to reply to messages as soon as they’re received. Applicable to telegrams, post cards, and letters, maybe, but completely unnecessary for email).

Anyway: this is how I avoid spending the entire day in my inbox.

Read Occasionally

The number-one rule of having a sensible relationship with your email is not to leave your email app open. Close it now! That little ‘ping’, or ‘click’, or red badge, or whatever announces a new email, is a distraction from what you should be doing: working. And answering emails is not working, it’s a supplement to working: something you do so you can get on with doing what’s really important (making money, saving the world, writing a book).

I open Mail once at about 10 in the morning, once again at about 2pm, and maybe once more at 4pm if I think something really important might be coming in. Most of the people I work with take around twenty-four hours to reply to an email anyway, so it doesn’t really matter how I time things.

(Regardless of what my old managers used to think, email is not suitable for urgent messages. If something is urgent [i.e. needs to be dealt with now urgent], then use the phone. This takes the pressure off the whole send email, receive email, read email, reply cycle and avoids giving clients/friends the impression that it’s OK to send you very urgent messages by email at eight in the morning (setting sensible expectations around email is important, you see, but that’s another blog post).

Filter Messages

I have a smart mailbox that only shows unread messages: this is my ‘inbox’. The mailbox doesn’t hide messages as soon as I’ve read them; instead, it updates when I switch to another mailbox or restart the app. So I can open Mail, read my latest messages, read some again if I want, then close the app. When I come back, my smart ‘inbox’ is empty and I’m not distracted by the display of a hundred messages from the past few days. Clear screen == clear mind.

Do Something!

When you get a message, do something with it! Don’t leave it sitting there, because you’ll mount up an awful debt of work that you’ll have to repay later, and you’ll have to dedicate a small portion of your brain power to remembering to answer those messages.

You really have three choices when it comes to a new email:

  1. Delete it. This should be a more frequent option than you think: anything irrelevant, spammy, or otherwise uninteresting can be deleted immediately.
  2. Reply. Reply now! Don’t wait until tomorrow, just send a reply (even if it’s a quick “I’ll get back to you”).
  3. File it. If a message is important but doesn’t warrant a reply, move it to a separate folder. That way, everything stays organised.

Very occasionally — if I’m stupidly busy — I’ll read a message and then mark it as unread as a ‘deal with this later’ flag. That way the message will still appear in my smart inbox when I come back next time (I don’t use flags for this, because it adds another level of complexity which I’d much rather avoid).

So that’s it: read occasionally, filter your messages, reply immediately, and be ruthless about deleting and filing your messages. This works for me — if it works for you too, email me ;)

(Further reading: Inbox Zero).