Do you hate to open your email in the morning? Do you cringe at the thought of how many messages (both read and unread) are there? Would you rather get a root canal than answer one more email?

If you answered “Yes” to any of those, you aren’t alone. But it’s possible to be a good business person and not hate your email.

As I am writing this, my Inbox count is 0, and it’s the middle of the afternoon. I don’t hate my email. I’ve learned to make it work for me, and you can too.

The problem is that lots of people use email as a “reminder” tool. The theory is that if it’s in your Inbox, you’ll be reminded to take action. But that system breaks down as soon as you have more than 10-20 email “reminders” sitting there. We just can’t keep track of that much information, so we ignore most of it. I’m speaking from experience here. I used to do the same thing.

So what can you do?

First, get your Inbox down to 0 as soon as possible. Once you’ve got it down to 0 messages, you can start managing it.

“But, Juli!” you say. “I’ve got over 1000 message there. How do I get it down to 0?”

One message at a time. It might take you a few days (or a few weeks), but you can pare it back. Make a goal each day to have fewer emails at the end of the day than you did at the start, and you’ll get there.

Start with the junk

The odds are that most of the emails in your Inbox are junk. Delete them. Be ruthless. Email newsletters. Offers for the latest cool tech toy. Blog posts someone else thought you might enjoy. Everything like that. Delete them, right now.

If you absolutely think a message might be useful later, okay. File it. But get it out of your Inbox now.

The Old Stuff

If you have a lot of emails cluttering your Inbox, odds are most of them are ancient. Or at least old. Decide on a reasonable cut-off date and get rid of them.

“But, Juli! What if there’s a critical client communication in there?”

So what if there is? You haven’t acted on it before now. Odds are it’s too late anyway. Get rid of it!

Everything Else

Now you should have a reasonable number of messages to take action on. Go through them one by one. If answering it will take less than 5 minutes, do it now. If it will take longer than 5 minutes, add it to your To-Do list and file the message. I suggest having an “Action” folder for those messages. I create the To-Do and then keep the email in my Action folder for reference when I’m ready to, well, take action on it.

If you don’t need to take action on an email, either file it or delete it.

This may be a painful process. You’ll find stuff you’ve forgotten to do. You’ll find messages from friends and family members you wish you’d responded to, but trust me, it’s better to do this and get rid of the weight of all those messages. You’ll be more productive in the future.

What do you do once you get your Inbox to 0 for the first time? Tune in Friday where I give you some suggestions to stay at or near 0 forever!

Tags: task management, time management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 at 6:09 am and is filed under Time and Task Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.