Make Managing Your Inbox A Priority

I estimate that I get about 150 emails in my inbox per day. This doesn’t include the emails that are automatically filtered to folders I never see. For years, I struggled with getting my email under control. There would be hundreds of emails in my inbox at a time. I remember more than once having to sort through over 1000. Once every few weeks I’d need to set aside a few hours and force myself to get through them. Inevitably, there’d be an important email I missed or forgot about. Most of my replies often started with “Sorry for the delay in responding.”

The problem was never that I didn’t check my email. I checked. Constantly. Impulsively. But I’d read them or give a glance over the unread ones and never did anything about them. Then another ten would come in the next hour. But there’s a difference between checking email and managing email. Most of us make checking email a priority, but put managing it on the back burner. It’s easy to see why. Most emails are spam, promotion requests, and cc’ed conversations that aren’t relevant us. Still, I would argue that managing your inbox should be a high priority for any professional.

It is this dichotomy that messes us up. We make it important to check email, but not important to deal with it. We saw that email about needing a document from us, but we promptly forgot about it as it got lost in the sea of email in our inbox.

There are a lot of strategies to managing email. Some might work well for you and others won’t. But if you make managing email an important task to do every day, you’ll be very motivated to figure out the best strategy for you. For me, on my list of daily to-dos, is Inbox Zero. It’s been the most effective way to get me to go through my email. Whenever I look back at Toodledo and see the Inbox Zero task not checked off, I grudgingly go back to my email to clear my inbox. This doesn’t mean just pushing it off to a “pending” folder, either. If the email requests a response or an action I can do then and there (whether I feel like it or not, whether it’s urgent or not, whether it’s convenient or not), I do it. Because it’s not about whether that email requires an immediate response — it’s about clearing it out of your inbox. The only emails that get passed along to a to-do folder are ones that I simply cannot do right away.

Part of managing your email includes keeping on top of those “pending” folders, too. Look through your “waiting” and “to-do” folders every day. Follow up if it’s time, and do them if you can.

Responding to emails in a timely matter is very important in establishing your credibility and reliability. If you don’t, someone else will, and in this age of instant gratification and easy connectivity, no one is going to wait for you to get a handle on your email. They’ll simply go to someone else who can.