E-mail is bad for you. I’ve tested this!

 A couple of posts ago I talked about information overload and how to cope with it, and whilst there are various ways to overload on the old ‘info’, this subject would not be complete without giving due credit to the single biggest facilitator of information overload in the digital age: e-mail.

Notice that I didn’t say culprit. It’s much to easy to blame e-mail for wasting your time, but that’s otherwise known as a shift of responsibility… and that attitude is not going to get you far in business or in life.

E-mail can’t make you stop and read e-mail.

Once we’ve taken responsibility for wasting time, we can actually take a look at ways to stop this from happening, or at least make it happen less often.

Clear desk, clear mind

A good friend of mine used to tell me that a clear desk produced a clear mind. He would clear his desk on a Friday afternoon before leaving the office, giving it a good wipe with some polisher and a cloth, and each Monday morning he would find a clear, clean desk ready to take on another week’s worth of scrap paper, pens, magazines and pie wrappers.

Despite the way the desk looked the rest of the week, there was a sound principle buried in the little routine my friend had devised for himself.

I was often shocked by the sheer amount of e-mails that most people seem to hoard in their inboxes. It’s ridiculous. I could never understand this, especially when they asked me for help… because they couldn’t find a specific e-mail.

Ironically, the higher up the corporate ladder you went, the fatter the inboxes would be! The MD of the company had over ten thousand e-mails in his inbox, and that was a few less than the marketing director!

Remember swaps? The more you had, the cooler you were. Well, it seems that we carry this attitude with just about anything in life. More is better.

But when it comes to time management, simplicity is the only way to go: you need to get a handle on all your tasks at the most basic level, and build up from there.

Clear inbox, clear head

I took the liberty of applying my friend’s probably-borrowed principle to my inbox. I’d tried the sloppy way of doing things - I even got quite good at it – but in the end I had to admit it wasn’t working for me.

Trust me: I’m an expert

I’ve battled with inbox-management for years, always back and forth between an inbox bursting at the seams and a ultra-slim inbox.

You probably have too. If not, you should have at least been gripped by the spring-clean bug and spent an entire afternoon going through your e-mails and sorting everything into some sort of pseudo-rder that makes sense only to you… only to fall back to your old ways of maintaining a fat turkey of an inbox.

This was me too, until I decided to get tough with my inbox

I finally reached boiling point one day when I was staring at my 500 e-mails, many flagged as important, or urgent, or pending… all of them screaming for attention.

I realised then, that there’s a very subtle thing that happens when you’re managing a business and an inbox, and it’s this:

The level of stress you experience, is directly related to how much effort it takes you to manage your inbox.

In other words, the more e-mail you have in your inbox, the harder it is to find and manage e-mails (and the tasks that you assign to each of those e-mails).

Before you know it, your inbox is not the only thing that’s over-flowing like Mount Teide…

I stared and thought: how many of those emails are making me money?

In my case, I asked myself: what would happen if I suddenly deleted ALL the e-mail in my inbox?

The truth, I had to admit in the end, after much pondering, is that nothing would happen to me if I lost those e-mails.

Sure, they were important to me at some level (I had kept them for a reason) and I intended to action them all… but the truth is that there’s not enough time to do everything you want to do, and when it comes down to it, moving e-mails around your inbox should not be one of your highest ambitions in life.

Drill deep down, past all the excuses, and you’ll probably admit too that you wouldn’t really miss all those e-mails clogging your inbox.

And if you did, you’d soon make the numbers up again…

So what to do! How to deal with this!

Everything in life is either a stress, or it is not.

An inbox overflowing with e-mail is stressful to manage. This means it creates stress within you, which in turn affects everything, including your mental processes (decisions) and physical processes (waddling over to the coffee machine for a top up of the strong stuff).

I found myself getting increasingly frustrated, not just by the time I was spending sifting through e-mails in search of information, but by the sight of my inbox alone!

The only way to move fast, is to carry less

I’ve tried working at either extreme, and nothing compares to working with a very ‘light’ inbox, with but a few e-mails that you need to action. It’s a healthy cycle:

• you work more efficiently
• you gain more time
• you feel better

It’s a ‘no-brainer’: clear your inbox and keep it that way.

Here’s how to keep your inbox slim

This gets technical, so hang on to your seats:

Create a rule of a filter in your e-mail software that moves every e-mail that is not work related (for instance, newsletter subscriptions and updates that you may receive) to a folder separate from your inbox.

The manual way: if you don’t know how to do this (do ask me) you can set up a folder and drag your e-mail there manually. If you’re doing this, I recommend you find somebody to automate this for you (by setting up a rule of a filter).

Just get every e-mail away from your inbox, and use your inbox as your thinking space.

Your inbox should contain imails that are being actioned currently, and that you’re ‘waiting on’ for a reply or an answer.

And when the task is done and dealt with, archive the e-mail – get it away from your inbox!

You’ll find yourself becoming more productive, efficient and more importantly… less stressed.