Category: Digital Chaos Control

Here’s a (potentially scary) question for you…

        What would someone learn about you if they took a peek inside your inbox?

        Would it give them an accurate picture of who you are?

What if I told you that how you run your inbox reveals even more about you than what’s inside it?

You may have heard this famous quote from Martha Beck:

        “The way we do anything is the way we do everything.”

And the same goes for the way we do email.

Like it or not, most of us spend a lot of time in our inboxes. But how exactly are we spending that time?

According to psychologists, our external environments — the way we keep our homes, desks, and yes, our inboxes — are representations of our internal worlds.

So, what inner landscape is your inbox revealing about you?

Option #1: Overstuffed and Chaotic Inbox

Does even looking at the number of unread messages in your inbox send you into a blind panic? Do you try to avoid your inbox at all costs?

You’ve probably missed an important email (or 20) because your inbox is overflowing. You can never find the important stuff when you need it.

How can you even begin to figure what’s important amidst the sea of random newsletters and marketing emails you never read yet never unsubscribe from.

You probably feel like giving up on your inbox altogether. You’ll never get through the backlog of unread stuff.

Maybe it’s time to select all → delete and get yourself a new Gmail account.

But that wouldn’t solve the problem, would it? Because your inbox isn’t the only thing in your life that feels overwhelming and chaotic. And an email is probably not the only important thing you’ve missed.

The Lesson

It’s not all or nothing, in your inbox or your life. Start unsubscribing from mailing lists that don’t serve you. Start saying no to unnecessary commitments and activities. Practice paying attention to what’s important. Consciously commit to not trying to do everything.

Option #2: Folder Queen

Your inbox is the digital equivalent of living inside The Container Store. A place for every message and every message in its place.

You’ve got more folders than a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. You love nothing more than dragging and dropping a message into its appointed spot. You’ve got the Tetris of inboxes!

Chances are your inbox isn’t the only meticulously organized and over-controlled area of your life. Maybe you’re a little rigid in the way you keep your home, your desk, your calendar…?

The Lesson

Do you need all those folders? Are you spending more time organizing things than actually dealing with them?

If you cut back on the structure a little bit, how would you feel? How would you choose to spend the time that you freed up by not dragging each metaphorical message into a different folder? What if your inbox — and your life — were a little bit messy and (gasp!) spontaneous?

Option #3: Inbox Zero or Bust

There is nothing more rewarding for you than the satisfaction of knowing you have no unread messages. Zip, zero, zilch. Inbox Zero is a way of life for you.

You are (unhealthily?) obsessed with reading and responding to each message as soon as it arrives. Check, read, respond, file… Again and again in an endless loop for the rest of time.

You love checking items off your to do list, and the Inbox Zero life gives you that in spades. Tiny little hits of accomplishment all day long.

Your inbox is not the only place in your life where you’re ruled by tasks. You need to complete them quickly, efficiently, and perfectly to feel a sense of accomplishment.

The Lesson

You’ve got to get off the achievement hamster wheel! You are not your inbox or your to do list. You are so much more than that, and your life will not fall apart if you miss an email or task (or 10).

At first, it might feel uncomfortable to know that you’ve got unread emails sitting in your inbox and unaccomplished tasks languishing on your to do list. That discomfort fades when you start to experience other ways to spend your time. You’ll find that you would never trade the freedom and flexibility that loosening that tie creates. You can still get things done without your inbox (or to do list) ruling over your time.

The Insights

So, were you surprised to learn what your relationship with your inbox says about you? Do some of your email habits reflect your larger life habits? Are there things about the ways you do email that you want to change?

The bottom line:

You are in charge of how how you manage things, in your inbox and all areas of your life and business. When you’re aware of your own habits, you’re in a much better position to know what’s working and to change what’s not.

Here’s to making your inbox work for you and your unique personality.

About the Author

At her core, Jenna Teague is a healer. Jenna comes from over a decade of supporting clients’ healing in her psychotherapy practice and sparking business healing for coaches and entrepreneurs. Jenna co-creates with her clients game-changing shifts in their lives and businesses. She knows, deep down in her bones, that presence always trumps perfection. Building community is what lights her up most.

If you want to see Jenna at her giddiest (and geekiest), invite her to your next creative brainstorming session. She lives for that. You can find her at Jenna Teague and Nourish Your Practice.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

There are many styles and personality types when working with technology.

Are you someone who composes emails but doesn’t send them right away? Do you have lots of applications running at the same time? Do you have lots of browser tabs open?

You may be a multitasker.

Apart from other reasons to rein in your multi-taking tendencies (read here for tips: Tricks That’ll Stop You from Multitasking), there is a technical reason that this style can be inefficient. That reason is: keeping multiple windows open and multiple tabs open in your browser can slow your computer down.

Your computer has only so much memory. When there are too many demands on that memory, the computer has to spend time swapping out data its hard drive. Try to close an application every time that you open an application and try to close a browser tab every time that you open one.

But if you’re multi-tasking, you may be keeping browser tabs open because you want to go back and finish something. If you find that you are consistently faced with too many tabs, there are things that can help.

For Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, use a browser tabs suspender extension.

This will automatically close (“suspend”) those websites in your tabs, but still keep track of them in each tab. You can reload those websites when you go back to the tabs.

 

For Microsoft Edge, use the “Set aside your tabs” feature.

Try bookmarking the websites and then closing the browser tabs.

Keep a bookmarks sidebar in your browser for quick access.
 

Try the Pocket extension.

After you install the extension and sign up for a Pocket account, you can save websites for later access. Pocket is my personal favorite for those websites that I want to get back to and then check them off as “done” (read). If I want to save a website instead for regular access, I will use a bookmark.

 

 
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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

In the “early days” of the Internet, websites discovered pop-up ads.

These ads were intrusive and annoying, and they were followed shortly by adware and malware pop-ups that posed as ads. Clicking on them at a minimum encouraged intrusive advertising. They could also possibly infect your computer with malware.

Internet browsers responded by adding a pop-up ad blocker which mainly took care of the problem.

Advertisers had to find another way. First, they came up with “pop-under” ads. These open up in another browser window under the one you’re using. You probably don’t see it until you close your browser window and then you wonder where it came from.

Most ads now show up somewhere in the page that you’re reading – at the top, in the sidebar, or in the text. Many are not intrusive and are relevant to the page that you’re on. (If you’re surprised that you’re seeing ads for something that you’ve searched for on Google or on Facebook, then you may want to check to see if you’re still signed into your Google or Facebook account. Both companies will track your internet usage.)

Some ads are still very intrusive and can slow your browsing experience down, particularly video ads that start playing when you visit the page. Although advertising is important if we want to continue to have a free internet, there are methods to block those annoying, intrusive ads.

If you’re using Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, then you can install an ad blocker extension (even on Safari in iOS now, and Firefox & Opera for Android). The most popular one is called “Adblock Plus”. After you’ve installed it, it will block the most intrusive ads.

The default setting in AdBlock Plus is to allow ads that are not intrusive (and it’s possible that it “whitelists” ads for a fee from advertisers). You may have to play with the blocking settings.

Do you need help with your digital chaos and/or to understand your technology?

We have online accounts for so many things these days – email, social networking, cloud services, financial services, medical accounts, even the local library. Security experts tell us that passwords should be long, cryptic, and unique for each account, but if you follow their guidelines, how can you possibly remember all of your passwords?

You’re trading security for convenience and saying hello to digital frustration.

I recommend handing over control to those security experts by signing up for a password management service. You’ll then install a password manager program on your computer and your mobile devices that will help you to generate passwords and securely save them.

You’ll need to set the program up with a master password, but you’ll only need to remember that one master password to let you into the password vault (write it down and put it in the safe!).

Of course, you’ll still need to remember a couple of other passwords – the password to log into your computer user account for example, and perhaps a computer administrator password if your computer is set up with one. (You may also need to remember your Apple ID or Google ID and password to install the password manager program.)

For my master password, I start with a word that has some personal meaning to me, add a character between syllables, a few numbers at the end (that I’m sure that I’ll remember), and then use the word in a complete phrase. For example, “Im#pala876ismyfavoritecar”.

Some password managers use the cloud to sync your passwords with your other devices.

For cloud sync, your password vault gets encrypted locally, on your own computer, and then transferred and stored unaltered on the cloud server. When you log into the service, the reverse process happens – the password vault is transferred from the cloud down to your device, and then decrypted.

I use LastPass as my password manager. Some of my clients use 1Password or Dashlane. If you use all Apple devices, and you don’t care about a nice interface, you can use iCloud Keychain to save and automatically fill in passwords for Safari.

Here’s a post at How-to Geek comparing password managers: Password Managers Compared.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”