Email Build Up
I Didn’t Check my Email for a Week and Here is What Happened
I have been using email for decades. And a bit ago, I did a thing I have never done.
I stopped triaging my email for an entire week!
The way I have dealt with email has evolved over the years, but I have always had a system to make sure that I deal with the emails I need to deal with. While I was on vacation I was curious to see what would happen if I didn’t “manage” my email.
Many of you know about my strategy of triaging email.
For those of you who don’t, the strategy is simple and it is based on the Inbox Zero concept.
Inbox Zero in a nutshell – Whenever you check your email inbox:
- Move the emails that need thought or action to a separate folder (get them out of your inbox) where they can be safe and waiting for you to work on them. (I call it the !IN_PROCESS Folder)
- And for the rest of the emails, either save them to other folders or delete them.
- Then, go to your “!In-Process” folder and deal with the email you have chosen to deal with.
I stopped triaging my email for one week and here is how the numbers played out.
127 emails hit my inbox.
Note: I have many filters and rules set up to divert certain emails into pre-established folders. Like “Deals” from fandango, Groupon and such, or Newsletters on health, pets, news, and other things that I may want to read but it won’t really matter if I never get to.
Of the email that hit my inbox;
19 were things I needed to do something about
57 were newsletters I subscribe to and like to read or scan regularly
34 Receipts, statements, and notifications
17 were spam type stuff that Gmail didn’t catch
Here are the practical results.
When I got back to work on Monday I did not allow myself to triage my email. But, rather I worked in my inbox as new emails came in and piled on top of the ones that were hanging out there.
In my working I had a couple of back and forth emails that needed responses. And here is what I found.
- It was frustrating to scroll back down and click on the “wrong” email in the thread several times before getting to the one that had the information I needed. (I should have “starred” it!)
- It was overwhelming to see the titles of the new email coming in. I often got distracted and switched to respond to that new top one and forgot about the one I had been working on.
The good part was, that once I decided to allow myself to triage my email, I was able to get to “Inbox Zero” in about 5 minutes.
I then had about 29 emails I still needed to read and answer and think about. These took much longer to deal with, but I knew that they were safe and would still be waiting for me when I woke up Tuesday morning.
Please schedule a FREE Strategy Session with me to learn more about this technique and other things about email, files, calendars, and contacts.
Don’t let your technology bully you!
