Posts tagged email

This past week was a busy one for me, and I fell behind on email. I checked messages as I could, and gave quick replies when I could, but I wasn’t keeping up. The iPad has a “badge” that shows how many unread messages you have, and it continued to climb. It wasn’t until Thursday night that I caught up on my emails, reaching the state that has come to be called Inbox Zero.

Silicon Valley productivity guru Merlin Mann has a forthcoming book by that title, and the term pops up on Twitter frequently as inbox-conquerors share their victories.

But you may be wondering what all the fuss is. What’s wrong with saving a few emails for later? Here’s what I like about Inbox Zero.

1. Short-Term Goals
For me, Inbox Zero is a goal, and meeting it provides a tangible sense of accomplishment and an end point to a period of intense focus. In this line of work, you never get finished with everything, so it’s easy to stay in a perpetual state of overwhelm without milestones to mark your accomplishments.

2. Freedom to close email
We seem to have developed the idea that we need to keep our email program open all day, and need to check it constantly. This is not how email was designed to be used; it’s an asynchronous communication medium.

When you reach a milestone like Inbox Zero, you know you can justify spending time on other types of work, and make the email wait until later.

If you keep email open all day, Parkinson’s Law suggests that you will spend all day on email, and this is both unnecessary and unwise. Hit a milestone, shut it down, and come back to it later.

3. Awareness
The most stressful thing about having 100 or more unread emails is that you don’t know what’s in them, so you don’t know if any are extremely urgent and/or important. While it’s unhealthy to feel the need to check your messages every few minutes, it’s reasonable to assume that urgent and important messages will need your attention within a day or so.

When you regularly empty your inbox, you limit the total number of messages that you have received but are unaware of. It’s easier to comfortably focus on other work when you know your urgent emails will get the attention they need within a few hours. But this only works if the emails waiting for you aren’t already a few days old.

How to Get There
Achieving Inbox Zero isn’t very hard, but here are a few steps:

1. Get your to-do list ready. Some of your emails will require action you can’t do while sitting at your computer answering email. Put these tasks on your to-do list and flag the message for follow-up. If you receive certain information via email that you need to log (such as teacher lesson plans or newsletters), get your log ready so you can move quickly through your messages.

2. Use the two-minute rule (sometimes): if you can respond or deal with the email in less than two minutes, go ahead and do it. The idea is to avoid putting off tasks that you can do easily, because putting them on your to-do list and following up later is time-consuming.

If it’s the afternoon or evening and I have a large uninterrupted block of time to work on email, I don’t use this rule – because there won’t be a better time later to deal with the most time-consuming messages.

3. Start at the top and work your way through your messages from newest to oldest. Many messages are sent to multiple people, and there may have already been replies that you’ll need to see before responding intelligently. (If you use Gmail or another threaded email system, you won’t need to worry about this.)

4. Set a goal for the time by which you want to reach Inbox Zero. If you know you want to be done in 30 minutes, you won’t slow down or distract yourself.

Go for it – reach the bottom of your email inbox today and see how it feels.