Manage My Email Inbox

When I successfully empty my e-mail inbox for forty days in a row, I’m gonna buy myself a digital voice recorder to help me collect my action items!

When my inbox has hundreds of e-mail messages in it, some of them months old, I’m haunted by all the people out there waiting to hear from me, or the tasks that need to be done. It’s the not-knowing that bothers me. David Allen calls these “open loops”, things that nag at me because they haven’t been captured in my reminder system.

When my inbox is empty, I feel confident that all the tasks are recorded in the appropriate place and I will get to the work eventually.

I hate having an inbox full of messages waiting to be answered or filed. David Allen, in Getting Things Done, has the concept of “getting IN to empty”, which means looking at each item in an inbox and determining whether it can be 1) done right away in 2 minutes; 2) filed because it needs no action; or 3) recorded in a to-do list because it needs action that will take longer than 2 minutes.

So my goal is to process and organize the messages in my e-mail inbox every day, so that it’s empty. I don’t think it’s realistic or efficient to try to answer each message as it comes in, or perform whatever associated action. I’ll let my to-do list handle that.