Commanding Emails: “Go To Your Rooms”

Sorting your inbox in the short term, so you can use scheduled time later to deal with the contents is great in theory, but how do you sort all those emails in the first place?  The solution:  Send them to their rooms.  A colleague of mine told me yesterday that he, again, had let his inbox go unsorted for 3 days and he now had 600 messages.  Daunting, but here’s what we did to solve the problem.

First I had him sort his inbox by the recipient (that would be the “From” column in Microsoft Outlook).  Since he had multiple emails from the same sources, I had him highlight each group that he needed to read and move them to an inbox folder named for that topic.  He had 8 emails from “J** R***” and they were all about the SR-Project.  He made a folder called “SR-Project” and all the emails pertaining to that project got sent to that “room”.  When he is ready to work on the SR-Project, he will have all the pertinent information in one place and will save himself time by not having to search for it.

We went down the list and sent everything of importance to its own “room” (folder).  A quick review of the remaining items revealed that he had a lot of junk solicitations for stuff he wasn’t interested in.  He had a choice to delete them all or to save one from each solicitor and un-subscribe later in his down time.  (He sent them all to the same “unsubscribe” room.)

After clearing out the obvious junk, he created a folder he called “Links & Sites to View”.  In here he put emails with links to sites that may or may not be of interest to him, but he didn’t want to spend his active working time reviewing them, so he sent them to their room.  He will come back to this later in the day when he’s scheduled time to devote to checking out this stuff.  So, 17 minutes later, inbox cleared and he was ready to work.

Notice that I am saying that these various items get done “later”.  This isn’t just any “later”, but time that you have scheduled for each activity.  There is a start time and an end time for each one.  Some of these emails pertain directly to work, others indirectly, and still others are questionable, but you feel you should take a look anyway.  You already know to use the “work” emails when you’re working.  But it’s the other types of emails that need their own schedules as well, or they will just pile up and start weighing you down.

Look at what other kinds of emails show up for you each day.  Decide how important it is to you, to deal with each of these kinds of emails and assign an appropriate amount of time.  Maybe you want to spend 1 hour a day on social networking, but only 30 minutes a week going through the junk stuff. Schedule those times for yourself.

Once you have scheduled those times (remember, there is a start time and an end time), show up and do that work in that time slot.  Move on to the next thing secure in the knowledge that things are getting done.  Schedule email “sorting” times during your day and you will not only feel more in control, you will be more in control.  As the boss of your inbox, open it up and tell it, “Go to your rooms.”