We've all experienced it. Leave for a quick holiday weekend, Christmas, a business trip and your inbox becomes a toxic sludge pile.
All the spam that creeped by your spam solution. All the FYIs and CCs. The requests that are already overdue. They all blink at you. Its all to daunting a task for your brain to deal with - where to start?
Close your door. Lock it if you can.
Turn off your phone and cell phone ringer and vibration.
Turn off your automatic email fetching in your email client.
Make a new folder or mailbox in your email client and name it with the date and the word archive. For instance: archive20060906.
Take all the emails in your inbox and move them to the folder you just created.
Open the archive folder you created.
Sort the emails by sender.
Glance through them quickly and move anything that comes from regular emails you receive back into your inbox.
Leave the rest in the archive folder
Go back to your inbox and resort the emails so that they are ordered by the date sent.
Deal with them one at a time.
If you can do the task in 2 minutes or less - do it.
If you can't do it in 2 minutes, skip it.
As you do the tasks, get rid of the email - archive it or delete it.
What's left in your inbox is your Waiting pile. You're waiting for something or someone to show up.
Create a folder called Waiting.
Move those to the Waiting folder you just created.
Turn back on your auto check.
Periodically, as you get a couple of minutes, deal with anything left in the archive folder.
Repeat the process above as you deal with the leftovers in the archive folder.
As you go kill the spam, file the FYIs and CCs, get rid of the crud with your magic delete key.
Always aim for an empty email inbox.
Don't forget to turn your phone back on and open your door.
This email inbox is clean!
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