Inbox

Last night, I listened to the first episode of “Back to Work,” one of several excellent shows, produced by Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 Studios. While I was listening, I was cleaning out my inbox, which at the time had approximately 200 emails in it, all of which I had read. For some reason, last night while I was listening to Dan and Merlin Mann talk about getting back to doing what you want to do, my 200-message inbox struck me as a very bad thing.

So I went through all of those e-mails, asking myself a few questions.

“Why did you keep this?” If I didn’t know or couldn’t remember I trashed it.

If I had a satisfactory answer, I ten asked “Do you still need to keep this?” If the answer was “yes,” I filed it someplace other than my inbox. If the answer was “no,” I trashed it I eventually got the number down to 14. Fourteen emails from nearly 200.

A lot of the emails I got rid of were important once, but not anymore. Updates on very transient events. As an example, I still had the e-mail chain between my father, brother, and I when my mother was in the hospital with pneumonia several months ago. Very important event. Long since past. Those emails are all gone now.

I filed some stuff; things I’d left in my inbox because they had information I’d need later. As I was going through, I realized that while, yes the information will be useful again, I wasn’t going to need it soon enough that I needed the message sitting in front of me all the time. It needed to be in a filing cabinet, not a post-it on my desk.

One common thing among all the stuff I deleted or filed. It was stuff I’d forgotten about. I’d consciously left these messages in my inbox at one point, but after sitting for a while they stayed there for no reason. My inbox had nearly 200 e-mails because of inertia. That’s a bad thing. I’m going to do my best not to let that happen anymore. Once I’ve done what needs to be done with any given e-mail, I’m going to get it out of my inbox. I’m going to be ruthless about it. And I’m going to try to do this at work, too, where practical.

A couple of hours ago, I watched a video of a talk Merlin does called “Inbox Zero.” In it he talks about exactly the problem I had. And gives a lot of tips for getting out from under email and avoiding getting buried in the first place. I think it’s worth a watch for anybody.

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