It took me a week of hard work, culminating now at 5 in the morning. (I haven’t gone to sleep so, no, it’s not “before 4pm,” as the saying goes.)
This time it’s for real. I will never again read an email without immediately handling it. It works with referee reports, why can’t it work for everything?
P.S. Now I have a backlog of 35 blog entries which I’ll have to spread over the next month.
Excellent! Congratulations! I love this state!
Congratulations on clearing your Inbox.
I am not sure if your resolution means what I think it does.
Will you process your inbox strictly sequentially? You won't peek ahead looking for important emails until you have processed all emails before it?
Please do blog once in a while about your battles with your Inbox. I am pretty much defeated, but I dream of rising up like the phoenix someday. Maybe you will be inspiration I need.
My work Inbox has 17,495 items, oldest from Nov 2007. I estimate that I have received twice that number.
I fully process about a third of the emails I get. I partially process about a third, and never get to the rest.
I do very quickly scan the email subjects of all the emails I get, and seem to be pretty good at subliminal processing. Even though I can't say anything about what I scanned, I don't think I have missed an email from my boss or his boss.
But I have often failed to respond to important work emails from the offshore staff who work for us. They send me gentle reminders days or weeks later, and there have been cases when I haven't noticed until the 3rd reminder.
I never have understood this fetish for having an empty inbox. How do you know what happened in your life? I have every email I've sent or recieved (excepting spam, of course) in the last 15 years. It's saved me countless hours of searching for pieces of paper or trying to remember random bits of information, not to mention saving my job once.
1. I will continue to only look at my inbox after 4pm.
2. After 4pm, I can scan my inbox, but I can only open a message if I'm prepared to deal with it immediately and then remove it from my inbox (delete it, store in a file, etc). I don't limit myself to reading emails in order, and peeking ahead is fine, but once I open an email, I'm committed to handling it before opening any others.
3. I don't have to read my email every day. It's ok to skip one or more days if I have other things to do. On days that I do read email, I try to get them down to 0.
I like this! I had a blinding revelation this spring that my inbox was basically the major awful thing in my life (maybe 35,000?) – deleted EVERYTHING – it is back to 3,500 or so again now and I need to set up a SYSTEM – in particular I need to stop answering student e-mails at all hrs of day and night, and also to delete stuff that I have dealt with… Thanks for the jump-start – I am going to GET ON THIS!
Having zero e-mails sitting in your inbox is a wonderful feeling. (Also, Andrew thanks for answering my stats question on your blog and by e-mail!) At work, I use Microsoft Outlook and one book that has helped me immensely with managing e-mail is Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook (2nd Ed) by Michael Linenberger (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Total-Workday-Control-Micro… ) The book talks about the four Ds of e-mail: Do it (if the item can be dealt with in less than two minutes); Delegate it; Delete it; or Defer it. It turns out that Outlook has a powerful system for creating different kinds of lists built into it. E-mail items that can’t be dealt with right away are the things that result in an overflowing inbox. Outlook allows you to move these deferred items on to different kinds of to-do list where you can sort them by priority and assign future start dates to them. As a result, these items move out of your inbox and then pop up on your to-do list at some point in the future. I’ve found this idea of moving things out of the inbox (where they’re usually sorted by receive date) and on to lists where you’ve classified them by priority and the date that you think you can actually get around to starting them to be really useful.
William Ockham – "handling" mail doesn't mean you delete it – it just means you look at it or its subject and do something with it. Read and archive, just archive, read and delete, or just delete.
My life got a lot simpler when I did one of those things to every email I got. Amazingly as time has gone on I have been deleting more and more (aside from spam mail which is just junked right away, mostly automatically). Good search tools in the last few years mean I don't even need to categorize anymore. I used to have separate folders for family and such, but now it all goes to one saved mail folder, since I can search so well.