Peace of Mind Organizing

Tackling the full inbox

2 December 2013

I have an Inbox Zero policy that I dearly love. It’s typically easy for me to maintain and keeps me feeling under control.

But stuff happens. My brother came to visit and then he and I traveled to Walla Walla, Washington, to visit our parents. I’ve been doing little more than glancing at email for the last ten days.

This morning, despite still being away, I decided to put my work hat back on. When I focused on my inbox, I found 183 messages. Seeing those 183 messages made me feel stressed and overwhelmed. And it made me want to walk away from my computer.

This served as an important reminder of how easy it is to get overwhelmed by email overload. And it’s also an important reminder of the value of dealing with my email every day.

Instead of walking away, though, I decided to set a timer and tackle the inbox. The first go around, I set it for 15 minutes. In that time, I went from 183 to 72 messages. I answered a few, but deleted or filed most. That felt a little better, but I knew I had to get it down to 15 or under if I was going to have some peace of mind. Only nine minutes later, I was down to 10 messages.

Of course, those 10 messages are the ones that will require a little effort to handle. But stripping away the others has clarified what I need to do and eliminated that overwhelming feeling. What a relief.

I now know that I can answer those 10 messages today and reinstate my empty inbox policy. It literally took 24 minutes of focused effort.

If your inbox is full, maybe you can set your timer for 15 (or 24) minutes and see how many emails you can file or delete. I hope you’re pleasantly surprised.

Tagged with: 15 minutes, email, inbox zero, timer

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