My Email Inbox Runneth Over

I once coached a client that had 12,000 emails in his Inbox.  Yes, that’s 12,000, not 1,200 or 120.  He was the clinical chief of a department at a major academic medical center.  I spent a half day with him teaching him how to better manage his emails using The Vanishing To-Do List, our time management module.

The best approach to dealing with any sizeable backlog of emails is to move all the excess emails, not visible when viewing your Inbox on your computer screen, into a separate folder.  You might call this folder “Email Backlog”.  This way you can begin focusing daily on keeping your email Inbox to just the number of emails you can see without scrolling.

At the same time, you will need to commit some amount of time each day or each week to work through the backlog until it is empty.  With several hundred or thousand emails in your Backlog folder, I recommend that you start with the oldest emails and work your way to the present day.  Many of the oldest emails will likely be emails that you can simply delete since having that many emails usually means you are using your Inbox as a file cabinet.

We teach that the email Inbox is not designed to be a file cabinet.  That is what folders are for.  The Inbox is simply a temporary accumulator of the requests or tasks showing up in our email.  Follow the steps above, and you will soon be delighting in a more manageable and less stressful email Inbox.  Check out Chapter 32 in my book (The Fit Leader’s Companion: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Sustainable Leadership Success) for more information on how to calendarize commitments.