It’s very common to procrastinate on dealing with your chaotic email inbox.
Does this sound familiar to you?
- You dread sitting down at your desk to look at email and feel guilty and anxious at the sight of your overflowing email inbox
- You stay at your desk longer every day to try to stay on top of your email inbox.
- The size of your email inbox keeps increasing.
- You have not just emails from your co-workers, clients, friends, and family, but also emails from school lists, notifications from social networks, and newsletters from retailers, vendors, and consultants (including mine! Sign up here: http://www.digitalchaoscontrol.com).
- You have missed important emails.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to miss important emails in the clutter.
Email is still an important communication tool but email volume continues to increase every year. It’s no longer possible to treat your email inbox like it’s a to-do list that keeps growing and growing.
How do we turn things around? There are differing opinions and advice on this. One well-known tactic is called “Inbox zero”, which is a technique that encourages you to take the time to look at each and every email and make a decision on it: delete, delegate, respond, defer or do. This is a great technique if you have the time and discipline to go through your email innbox every day, but most of us don’t have enough free time to prioritize email management. You may think that you’ll have some time later when things are less busy, but the truth is that your future self will probably be just as busy.
The first thing to do is to relax.
The size of your email inbox doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re not missing important emails or losing track of them, you’re responsive to your clients and co-workers, and that you can find the email that you need when you need it.
Don’t worry about getting to Inbox zero. There are other more productive and efficient ways to deal with email. Read this blog post: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive for some tips, and contact me for some one-on-one or group expert help.
