Recently, a friend and I had a discussion about organizing our lives. There are many tools out there for this specific purpose. Evernote. Trello. Workflowy. These are ones I’ve used or still use. My friend, at the time, was looking for some sort of task management tool. And we eventually came around to talking about the one thing that arguably needs management more than anything else: the inbox.
At the time, my inboxes, plural, were empty. As of this writing, I am still in the single digits spread across three email accounts.
I told my friend how I was able to do this. While he’s still working on a blog post about the greater task of task management, I figured I’d share how and why my inbox message counts remain manageable.
There’s that saying about necessity and invention. In college, I joined a club and, after a year, found myself in an officer’s position where I had to deal with dozens of conversations with multiple company representatives at any, and every, given moment. Before this, I kept all my messages in the inbox. It was overwhelming with these new responsibilities. The process I ended up developing to deal with this problem has served me well since then, through two jobs at digital agencies, and more than a year of traveling around the world.
This process works for virtually any email service out there. I use it for Gmail, but it worked just as well for Outlook. However, this process requires one very important thing. You must – absolutely must – be proactive in replying to people. While this is good advice in general, this process falls apart if you are the sort of person who habitually delays responses.
Here’s what I do to keep my inbox under control:
- Star or mark all of the messages you need to reply to. If a message demands action you should note it with something of importance.
- Go through the rest of your messages and see if you need any information on hand. These can be things like airline reservations, documents for current projects, or notices about important upcoming events. If it is important for your foreseeable future, keep it in your inbox.
- Archive everything else.
That’s it. Three steps for a more manageable inbox.
Note that the third point didn’t say “delete.” Archive your emails. Tag them. Put them in folders. File them away. Make them easy to retrieve if the need ever arises. They’ll be fine. Every email service has some sort of text search feature if they somehow manage to get lost.
Of course, it’s never that simple. What you deem as important really determines what remains in the inbox. And it takes time to consider what is and isn’t important, inbox-wise.
If you need help starting, I like to think of the inbox as something like my own room. My room has a closet. If I don’t need it, or don’t need very quick access to it, it goes into the closet. Maybe I’m going to a formal event. For that, I’ll spread out the formal attire I’ll wear across my bed to remind myself not to leave home in a t-shirt and jeans. Otherwise, that dress shirt and tie stay in the closet.
Another way to look at it is to consider what needs your attention. If it’s in your inbox, it’s because it needs your attention. Everything else is superfluous, and therefore doesn’t need to be in your inbox.
Admittedly, all I can say about this process is that it’s worked (very well) for me. If you’re looking to clean out the inbox, hopefully this can get you on your way.