Why Keep Your Inbox Zero

Where I used to be

I used to keep all of my emails for "future reference". And I used to end up with thousands of emails and I don't have any idea what's in most of them. My inbox used to be a growing blob that gets bigger and bigger on a daily basis. What's more is that I have about 5 emails (four personal email and one work email) each of them growing in relatively fast rate. My emails comes from everywhere such as notifications, subscriptions, scams, and friends. But in fear that I might delete the wrong email I don't delete most of them. On my work email for example, I receive an average of 40 emails per day so I get 1200 emails in a month. I will tell you I could not read all of these emails. There are emails that I usually just keep in my inbox unread.

I felt a little uncomfortable knowing that there are emails sitting in my inbox that may need my attention. I tried to keep up and read them but with the rate that emails are going to my inbox and the time that I have it's really hard to do that consistently.

What I did was to delete (almost) everything in my inbox. I documented the task in this blog post WORKING ON EMPTYING MY INBOX. Then started working on proper inbox management.

But why do it?

I want to be able to leave the office knowing that everything in  my inbox has been addressed/acted upon. I want to be able to have time the next day to process new mails and do other work. You see processing email is just one of the work. If all I do is process emails then I do not get the work done.

Freeing your mental RAM

I also want to FREE my mental RAM so that I can allocate some of my thinking ability to creativity where I can give more value. By mental RAM, I mean the conscious part of my brain. Thinking about your email and feeling guilty about not being able to process consumes mental energy and saps your creativity. 

Feeling sense control and accomplishment

Working on an empty inbox will help you feel in control because that means that you are ready for the next thing. When you are able to process you email, you will feel a sense of accomplishment seeing your inbox zero.

What's next?

Processing each mail in your inbox will tell you what work needs to be done outside of email. It will help you prioritize your work items. So emptying your inbox is step 1 but the next step is how you go from there. There are different strategies on how to empty your inbox but you have to decide what will work for you. What works for me is my laptop and my notebook. That will help me become effective on a daily basis. If I get work done it is because I have these two things on my desk.

I will share my technique in my future articles but for now think the possibility of emptying your inbox. Tip DELETE, ARCHIVE, and SEARCH are your friends. :)

Thanks

Joseph