My Best Practices: Battle with the Inbox

Emails are like mosquitoes...or plaque. They're super annoying and they just keep building up. Nobody really loves email, but it's just the way biz gets done these days.

If your inbox is anything like mine, I'm constantly at war with it and "archive" is my happy button.

Emails during travel...the worst.

You can also tell a lot about a person by taking a peek into their inbox: How it's organized, how many are unread, how many aren't archived. I truly cannot understand the people who have thousands of emails in their inbox and refuse to archive (ie. my husband!...but he's also a lightweight hoarder so it totally makes sense).

I did some tracking of my own emails over a 2 week period and came up with some numbers (work email only):

• I averaged about 75 emails a day (not including spam) 
• About 60% are either news, notifications, team emails, or ones I'm cc'd on that I can immediately archive 
• About 30% are emails that take less than 3 min to respond 
• The remaining 10% requires additional action. That's roughly 7-8 emails a day that have the potential to totally derail my day. 

Over this last quarter I've been trying to implement best practices to best manage my emails, and my sanity. I've taken bits and pieces from blogs, podcasts, books, etc. and have come up with my own method that so far has been working me.

1. Don't let your emails dictate your time and focus

I've turned off my phone notifications so that I'm not constantly getting pinged. I have to go into my emails and refresh to see what came in. This way, I feel like I'm in control and not a victim to a million requests.

2. Unsubscribe to everything

Everything you fill out on online is a lead generation and you're automatically on somebody's list. You can easily bulk unsubscribe by clicking on all the emails you don't want, click spam, and then the option to unsubscribe all. Do you really need to know that a pair of jeans are on sale? If the email is useless to you, take yourself off the list.

3. Schedule time for your emails

Schedule chunks of time throughout your day to check your email. I found that half hour in the morning, once in middle of the day, and then end of the day can be enough. It doesn't always work that way when I'm in correspondence with someone, but in general, I resist the urge to constantly check my email. If something's extremely urgent, most people know to text/call me.

4. Prioritize what you need to respond to

If something takes under three minutes, I'll respond right away. If anything longer, I'll tag as an action item and either schedule in my calendar, or make time for it when I'm done with my priorities for the day.

5. Keep your inbox CLEAN!

I constantly archive and I've configured my inbox so everything is on one page (read how). I have three sections: Unread, Read, and those tagged as "Action Items".

• Unread emails are all new; I try to have nothing older than 2 working days.
• Read emails are those I've opened but not important enough to tag as an action, and not yet archived.
• Action items requires some kind of additional action, ie. a proposal, event, marketing request, make a call etc., takes longer than 5 min. I then schedule these directly in my calendar.

So, that's it folks. If you were at all interested, these are my practices that I've been trying to stick to. I've found that I feel more productive at a higher level, and not just task oriented.

If you have any that have helped you, please feel free to share!!