There is nothing quite so wonderful to the "constantly searching for any distraction" mind than a clean inbox. A clean inbox means nothing to answer, nothing to reply to, nothing to think about over and over and over again while you are trying to actually get something done already! There was a time when I used to get over 3000 emails in my outlook inbox a week. My email and job seemed unmanageable.. so I cleaned it out.
Some of you out there may not see the benefits, may not realize how peaceful the inbox can be once it is devoid of distraction. Here is a picture:
What does this image bring to your attention?
Nothing.
What screams "TAKE CARE OF ME NOW!"?
Nothing.
How peaceful. How serene.
Here's some ideas that helped me do this.. maybe it will help you out.
1. Create Subfolders on your inbox (BUT NOT TOO MANY)
The biggest change in getting my email organized was the creation of subfolders underneath my inbox. When I started out I created subfolders for everything and anything, meticulously dividing into atomic logical boxes every item of information. Yeah.. that didnt work. You have limited time in your day for email sorting so the larger the container.. the easier it is to grab a bunch of emails and move them off your inbox to a folder.
As an example, in my job there are alot of emails that are sent en masse to a large IT group and many of them I have no input on or involvement. I created a subfolder called Work Order Management and then a folder under that called "Issues". At some point during the day after I've worked on, read or responded to something, a great group of these emails get dragged to this box.
I did not divide them up into Issues - Email, Issues - Printer, Issues - Idiotic users, etc.. because I found that A. it wasnt hard to find an email in the big bucket B. I really don't go searching for these emails very often anyway and C. Because I do this daily I found I was growing tired of trying to decide which folder a certain issue belonged in.. I mean what happens if an Idiotic user sends an email about a printer?
2. Set aside a time block each day (or certain days)
Back in the 3000 email world.. I was having alot of trouble finding time to manage email. I had constant interruption, issues to resolve, mountains to climb, goals to achieve.. I was Working! Unfortunately, I usually never found time to clean the email until it was clocking over 8k and I'd have to kill a day of productivity filtering it out. I then decided to take a time slice of 15 minutes from 8 to 8:15 in the morning devoted to only email sorting. This was a small enough time to not impact any deadlines, conversations or committments I'd made, and miraculously I was able to easily keep up with the hundreds of emails due to the nice division of buckets described in 1. For some reason just getting it in my head that the 15 minutes was scheduled, mandatory and unable to be touched by special meetings allowed me to do it most days religiously. I did have to change the time slot a few times due to changes in schedule.. but you gotta do what works as long as the 15 minutes a day happens.
3. Keep the to do stuff up front and center
Once you've experienced the clean inbox.. man do emails annoy you when they're there. Luckily the only emails I keep are the ones I actually have to act on.. and usually ONLY the items that require action.. and only the last email from the activity. If you need to find out what happened before.. you can look in your folders or many times just look down the thread of the last email you got. In this way I found that the items in my inbox became constant reminders of things I actually needed to do, the noise filtered out and damnit if I wanted a clean inbox, I better just go do it. I also would not allow myself to file something that needed action.. it encouraged me to act.. to file would be cheating. Voila! Productivity!.. get the inbox to work for you!
4. Create Subfolders for general information
One of my favorite folders is called "Reading and Research". I would very often get forwards from people or notifications on topics that would require me to read something long, digest information and in general "pay attention". Rarely did I get these emails at a time where I wasn't writing code, solving a problem or driving 55 miles an hour down an interstate. I kept loseing these emails and others that I really did want to follow up on. Only when I started filing these away separately did I realize I could go back in and read/analyze/investigate at my leisure.. and these emails weren't diluted by a bunch of information from the Fix Me/Solve ME email camp. It's also nice when you can go talk to a coworker about something they forwarded for review.. even if its two weeks after they sent it.
There you go, 4 helpful tips to get you to the beautiful peaceful world of the empty inbox in outlook. The same principles apply to Google Mail and I'll probably blog about that separately at a later date.
Happy Producing!
No comments:
Post a Comment