There are 4.2 billion email users.

That's a lot of people who can clutter your inbox and impede your productivity.

In today's age, emailing continues to be one of the most prominent forms of professional communication as well as system-notifications. This means that your inbox has a high probability of getting too busy or out of control.

I'm going to share with you my approach to using my inbox as a To Do list so that I can stay productive and organized.

Let's dive in.

Batch Your Emails

If you're like me then you're receiving an email every couple of minutes.

My team, clients, partners, collaborators, opportunity seekers and system-emails all have the opportunity to distract me over 100 times a day.

The trick is to not let them.

I've disabled notifications for email on my devices (outside of a few key clients) and don't have my email client open on my machine while I work because that's asking for a distraction.

Rather set aside time in your calendar each day, either once or twice a day, to go through all the emails in one sitting.

I go through my inbox at 05h00 each morning and 17h00 each afternoon.

More often that not, people are okay with waiting a couple of hours for a response. If something is critical then they can call or message you over whatever platform you use for communication. Don't think that you always have to respond within 2 minutes of receiving an email.

That's a slippery slope to never getting any work done.

Determine the action

In my mind, there are 5 potential actions to take when receiving an email in your inbox. You either need to Create, Acknowledge, Respond, Document or Ignore.

Create speaks to you needing to start a new thread or reach out to someone. A new lead or a question that you may have that needs to be asked.

Acknowledge refers to replying with a quick email to say "Thanks for the information" or "That's great, we'll chat soon". You're either closing the loop on that thread or delaying to a later point.

Responding means that you're needing to continue that conversation. Maybe you're needing to find out some more info about an API or get a scoping document from a client.

Document means that there was some crucial information, either in the email body or an attachment, that you'll need down the line so you need to effectively document and store that information somewhere.

Ignore is just that. Maybe it's a system-message or an email you just needed to read but not respond to.

Take action

When you sit down to go through your inbox, do what you need to do. Create a new thread, send an acknowledgement receipt, continue the conversation with a response, document the content or ignore after reading.

Once you've taken action, delete the email if you won't need it again or archive if you think it will be of importance down the line. You've remained productive by taking the relevant action and remained organized by clearing your inbox.

There may be scenarios where you can't take action right away. You may need to generate an invoice or get some more information before responding. In this scenario, leave that email in your inbox until you have the opportunity to appropriately take action.

This means that after each batch email session, you would have dealt with all the emails that you could and anything that's left over forms a To Do list that you need to tackle.

This means you don't have any communication debt or an email request lost somewhere in page 3 of your inbox because you didn't take note of it faster enough.

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I hope this framework for dealing with your inbox is useful and can help you become more productive and organized in a life consumed by emails.

By practicing this, you're turning your inbox into a backlog of work that needs some form of action instead of an absolute mess of communication debt.

See you again next week.

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