Rallying Email Discipline

CONNECTIONS | by SHERRY STRIPLING

OF THE MANY GOOD TIPS for working toward an empty email inbox, the most useful to me is mustering the discipline to control how often I check email.

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If I check all day, the emails stack up. I glance at them, grab the highest priority (or most easy to accomplish or most interesting), and then hurry back to the task or project that my mind keeps chastising me for having abandoned. The result is emails that don’t get the attention they deserve. I’ve read the emails but not acted on them, which leads them to linger and breed ― more than once into the thousands.

But by setting specific times aside for email, the emails become My Next Scheduled Task. That releases me to concentrate, increasing the odds I’ll make the appropriate decision and move on.

Two keys:

1. Make one of four common decisions, from a focused state:

• Delete it
• Answer it immediately
• Put it in an Action folder, making a note on your To Do list of the action or information needed
• Tag it with extra identification (if your email program allows that) and archive it

2. Trust the search function:

• Keyword searches also automatically check emails that have been “archived” in many email programs, which can be as effective as searching individual folders
• Folders have a downside: They are not exact: “Should this email go in the Purchases or Office Expenses folder?” “If this email provides my aunt with my friend’s address, should it go under Family or Friends?”

The blissful result:

• Higher productivity
• A sense of being in control ― for once
• An inbox that is emptier, if not empty