How to keep a clean inbox

 

HBR management tip of the day for the 18^th of May was focused on stopping email overload. Given the impact of email on our lives, this story seems one that likely caught the attention of most of their readers. Looking at their 3 tips, to me the one that seemed easier to say than do was “keep a clean inbox”.

"It’s easier to handle incoming messages without clutter staring back at you. Create a new folder called "Old Inbox" and put all your messages in there. Then when new email comes in, sort it right away."

Having implemented their tip on occasion – ie create a folder called old inbox and move everything there - it always seemed to me the hard part was then keeping it clean and I thought I might take a moment to share my methods for mostly doing this.

1. I set aside a time to process my inbox. My choice is first thing in the day. Some experts consider it shouldn't be the driving factor in the day but in the work I do, I'm often responding to other people, so my work is my inbox!

2. With all my accounts coming into one inbox*, it can seem an overwhelming mess, so I filter by the different types of messages I want to process, in my priority order. Then I work through the different filters until my inbox is empty.

3. Many of the messages that arrive in accounts that I am responsible for, need input from my colleagues. These I assign to the right person with questions. The act of assigning, unlike forward, takes the message out of my inbox (nice and clean, you see the appeal now) and puts it into their inbox. These messages invariably come back but when they do, the task they refer to is closer to being finished.

4. Where I can reply straight away, I do – general rule, can this be done in under one minute? If yes, then do so. Then I label and file the message, in a unified folder that colleagues can also access.

5. If I can't give the message away (assign) or answer straight away, I place it in the Reminder folder for a time that I set aside for doing these tasks. The message is then removed from my inbox until the time that I have specified, at which point it reappears with the notes I made for what I want myself to do.

I try to keep working through the messages until none remain, then refresh for those that have arrived (or been answered) during my processing session and work through the messages again. At that point – I turn off my email (no matter how much I want to keep hitting refresh to see what new messages have come in) because by this point, I should have figured out what tasks I need to do for the next few hours.

Then I repeat this process a couple of times during the day.

I wonder sometimes that it's taken me over fifteen years to learn this email best practice but for me it's better late than never! So my question goes out to the readers of this blog - where do you feel you're at with your ability to keep your inbox clean?

*Note: that some of the methods I use, are based around use of Unified Inbox. You may have other products you prefer to use, that may or may not have these functionalities.