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September 22, 2006

It's easier than you think

You've probably heard by the now that getting your Inbox to zero on a regular basis is one of the Holy Grails of GTD. Why? Because it takes less effort to work from a place of zero than to keep things in your Inbox. Unprocessed emails are a drag on your time and attention just like stacks of unprocessed paper on your desk. It forces your brain to keep re-looking, re-evaluating and re-question what it has already seen.

I did a coaching session recently and tackled this email challenge. This is an extremely successful company with highly-skilled staff dealing with lots of volume, particularly email. The person I coached was convinced that getting email to zero (and getting it back there regularly) would never happen. I knew it wouldn't be that hard. And I knew she'd get so much value experiencing zero and getting to the reality of what the actionable ones really were among a sea of so many sitting there.

We started with about 700 in the Inbox. She processed out the non-actionable backlog first. Then we looked for the obvious ones to delete or file (sorting by date, sender or subject makes this easier.) If that's only a few dozen or few hundred, it wont be take long to do that. If you're dealing with thousands (87,000+ in the Inbox is my standing record with a client so far) then it's probably not realistic or a good use of your time to go through those individually. Consider creating a folder called Archive or Old emails and park any that you feel confident you don't have action embedded in there. Then what you're left with is current action. Park those in an Action email folder and/or capture your next action on a list.

After processing out the backlog, she was left with an astonishing 7 actionable emails that were parked away in the Action folder. Inbox was empty. She had never seen In at zero
and was elated. That whole process took less than an hour and she felt like she had a trusted place to go back to for Action.

Give it a try. I bet you'll be amazed to find it's easier than you think.

Posted by Kelly at September 22, 2006 10:05 AM