How many emails do you receive per day on average? 20? 40? 100? 200??
For me, it’s not always that simple to count them up because I have so many different email accounts for my various blogs and businesses. I guess that on a usual day I get somewhere between 100 and 200 emails. But what is even more important to think about here, is just how many of those emails are useless??
How many newsletters are you subscribed to that you just never get around to reading? And how many lists did you end up on automatically because 2 years ago you bought something online and the company just popped your name onto their mailing list?
We all become victim to Inbox Overload at some point…but even if you’ve got thousands of emails sitting in your inbox right now, you CAN take control of your email account again!
Why Zero Out Your Inbox
You may not yet believe it, but having absolutely no emails left in your inbox can have a profound impact on your day.
Think about this. You get up in the morning, you go to your computer and you open your email account. Staring back at you are 50 new messages from today and 1200 messages that you just haven’t yet done anything with from the last few years. You’d like to one day do something with those mails, and you intended to read a bunch of them…but you just never got around to it. And now that task is mounting every day and growing to be an impossibly unpleasant event.
But you don’t need to be scared of looking in your inbox for fear of the clutter. Today is the perfect day to put it all to an end and take control.
How Clean Out Your Inbox
The first step is simply to start deleting.
- Start with the stuff that you routinely delete (like old newsletters — and while you’re at it, unsubscribe yourself too).
- Delete notifications from sites like Facebook, Twitter and so on — because you’ve already seen that information in another place and the notices are now useless.
- Use the search feature in your email inbox to find all messages from a particular person/service and either delete them all at once or file them away.
- If there are old mails that you needed to respond to but weeks have passed, perhaps it would be best to just shoot off a quick email or pick up the phone to ask if whatever was requested in the email is still needed. It could be that the person found another source of the information, and you’re now off the hook to delete that mail and move on.
- If there are some messages which you just don’t know what to do with and cannot delete, create a Processing folder and stick them all in there. Then you don’t have to look at them every day — and you may find that in a few months, you can delete them anyway because you really don’t need them anymore.
Keep it empty!
Do not let the inbox numbers creep up into the hundreds again. Every day, you should set aside a few minutes to process your mails. If you can’t get it down to zero every day, at least set aside some time once a week to bring your inbox down to zero (or close to it) again.
- If something can be answered within 2 minutes time — just take care of it right there. Quickly responding to an email with a short but sweet answer is always going to be far more worthwhile than letting it sit there for a few days or a week until you get around to it.
- If something needs further research or attention, put it on your to do list. If you’re using the Evernote GTD system, email it to yourself to follow up on. Don’t let it get lost in the shuffle of your emails.
Consider the usefulness of every email that comes into your inbox. If it is junk mail or a newsletter, take a moment to think about whether you are actually reading those newsletters when they arrive or if you’ve been saving most of them for a rainy day for the last 3 years. (Trust me — I used to subscribe to a recipe newsletter that I did exactly that with. I just filed them away and there they still sit. I’ve never tried any of those recipes to date!)
My Gmail Tip
You might remember that I recently talked about why I love Gmail so much and how it can change the way you process your email. Maybe you prefer a system like Outlook or something entirely different instead…but the fact of the matter is that there is no better day than today to start deleting emails.
I like Gmail because I can create all sorts of filter that will automatically process my emails in different ways. I have emails from about 10 different email addresses flying into Gmail at one time. Some mails get sent to certain company folders immediately, and others will get deleted immediately (which are part of a mailing list like FlyLady that I want to stay on but just don’t need to read all the various mails from). The folders (or tags) keeps things orderly while also allowing me to check all my mail in one place each day.
Are you ready to take control of your inbox?
