Email Dashboard

Alright, I guess this implies more tips to come, so hopefully I can figure some out.  And sometime in the near future I’m going to write a lengthy description of my personal email management techniques.

But, in the meantime, here’s a simple tip I used to help get my email life under control.  I just looked at my inbox a while back (at the time it had about 400 emails in it that required some type of action – a response, a task, filing, followup, whatever) and gave myself a simple goal: I would end every day with ten less emails in my inbox than the day before.

I actually beat that goal by a bit, and after a month my Inbox was down to about 20 and lately has been floating between 20 and 30.  I do have intentions of getting it down to empty, but the difference in stress reduction and time savings already is amazing to me.  I’m not sure how much is real improvement and how much is psychological, but my workday is just so much smoother with an inbox like this.

Now, some of you have 10,000 emails sitting in your inbox and will have to wait until I write a much broader scope email management post.  But for those of you who have 100-1000 emails in your inbox, I hope you give this simple task a try.  It’s very easy to stick to and the benefits are amazing.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.