On Processing Your Emails
Having a plan for dealing with your emails is a must!
Tim Challies has written what I think is the most helpful article I’ve read on processing and organising the constant flow of emails into your inbox.
What to do with them
He writes that with every email you receive, you have a few options:
1) Trash it: “If it is junk or something that is irrelevant to you, erase it.”
2) Archive it: “If it is something you may need in the future, but that requires no action on your part, archive it.”
3) Reply to it: “If you can reply to it in no more than ten or fifteen seconds and with little mental exertion, do that right away.”
4) Move it to your Reply folder: “If you cannot reply to it in just a few seconds or if it will require some thought, move it to your reply folder.”
If you do this for every email that comes in, you will achieve Inbox Zero.
Where to put them
But for this process to work smoothly, you need to have three locations set up in your email:
1) Inbox: “A place to receive new email.”
2) Reply: “A place to hold email you will reply to at a later time.”
3) Archive: “A place to hold email you need to keep for archive purposes.”
I've been using this method for a number of years and it has worked well for me.
A few extra tips…
Some other tips I've picked up:
I don't need to reply to every email. Unless I'm specifically asked a question, I don't respond.
Process the reply folder once a week. Do the quick replies throughout the week, and schedule a time to go through and reply to all the emails that require more thought.
All the newsletters I’m subscribed to get sent to Mailbrew and a list of these are delivered to me in one scheduled email every morning. This has dramatically reduced the number of emails I receive during the day. It usually takes 5-10 minutes to clear these emails each morning.