Merlin Mann has a series of articles called Inbox Zero about managing your email. He gave a Google Tech Talk this week on the topic. The talk was about 30 minutes and there were 30 minutes of questions and answers.
There are slides but skip them, here's the important point, borrowed from Getting Things Done. Process your email regularly and choose something to do with each message. Here's the list of things Mann chooses from for each message:
Delete (or archive)
Delegate
Respond
Defer
Do
Once you get in the habit of doing something with each message supposedly it's easier and requires less thought. My inbox currently has 65 messages and I usually keep it at 30. When working I tried to keep it at about 100 and I usually got 200 messages a day. Merlin makes a good point, if you email volume is enormous, it's probably not an email problem you have but a problem with the way your company communicates. Still in the Q&A he has some suggestions. Now to get that inbox to zero.
2 comments:
Interesting timing. I've had 250+ messages sitting in my inbox since the end of May, and it was driving me nuts. so last Friday I took several hours and dropped that down to zero. I swore to myself I would keep it there. currently there's one message in my inbox, and that's a link to Carnegie Mellon Today's website. :)
I get about 200 messages a day as well, and yes it's a corporate communication issue. I have found that my most effective way of dealing with inbound messages is to file them, while at the same time tossing an appropriate "next action" on my action items list (thank you Paul Allen). So far, so good. And, I seem to be getting things done as a result.
I seem to be alone in having a mostly empty inbox, to the point where I can choose to leave reminder messages in there and it doesn't really change the S/N ratio.
Right now, I have 5 messages in my personal inbox and 3 in my work inbox. I guess I've just always been good about taking care of messages as they arrive. I'd say that I rarely have more than 10 messages in either of my inboxes (unless I haven't checked mail in awhile).
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