Clearing your email inbox

The truth is that you probably can take the average email inbox — even a relatively neglected one — from full to zero in about 20 minutes. It mostly depends on how much you really want to be done with it. The dirty little secret, of course, is that you don’t do it by responding to each of those emails but by ruthlessly processing them. Is that how you thought this worked? Answering 500 emails in 20 minutes? Jeez, it’s no wonder you’re such a mess. Your cognitive dissonance is epic.

Here’s the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don’t have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven’t responded to — that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you’re just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can’t possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It’s all reasonable and it’s all accurate, but come on: something’s gotta give.

There’s an easy but non-obvious way to win at this Catch-22: you cheat. You rewrite the rules. You adapt at a higher level. You don’t answer them all. Not even most of them.

The other day over on the board, we were talking about “triage” and how our meaning of it in personal productivity evolves out of battlefield (or emergency room) assessments of the best way — at that given moment and considering myriad factors — to do the most with limited resources and a theoretically unlimited demand for them:

I think the roots of the term are indeed in medicine, where patients are dealt with based on one of three (hence, “tri”) statuses: those who can survive with immediate help, those who can wait, and those who won’t make it no matter what.

The fascinating thing to me about the metaphor is that the status of one patient is almost always necessarily based on the status of the others, and new additions re-jigger the equation. Just like in to-do lists.

Use your judgement about whatever best removes your blocks and gets you through the pile with your sanity intact.

Personally, I’d concentrate first on just processing based on a battlefield “biage” (is that even a word?). Delete the obvious spam, chain letters, and kitty photos. Archive the mailing lists and blog comments (sorting by subject is great for this), all the while identifying, flagging, and relocating all the actual important stuff to a “pending” folder — that’s the stuff that will take your real brain power and valuable time. Just get that sucker down to zero now. Fast. Go.

Only when you’re at zero do you return to “pending,” concentrating on short responses and generation of to-dos. Gang your work, stay in one mode, and if you start getting exhaustipated, just take a break and return by running dashes 3-5 times a day.

Understand: if you’ve really let things go, you ain’t gonna hit bottom in any 20 minutes. But be patient, and keep your eyes on the prize. This is annoying, time-consuming, mentally draining work, but as you see that count dropping and dropping, you’ll find unbelievable energy and resolve; you’ll be deleting faster and realizing that all you keep is really valuable and worthy of your time. This feels so good that you’ll never want to go back. But if you do, just get back on the horse. Process, process.

Think in shovels not in teaspoons.

Found at 43 Folders