Digital Chaos Control

Tag: gtd

Inbox Zero Eliminates Overload – by Michael Neuendorff
Do you suffer from email overload?

Terrible, isn’t it? Every time you open your Inbox the email just flows in like a waterfall.

The challenges with managing email are myriad. Here are a few:
- Feeling overwhelmed before even getting started
- Losing track of an email and asking the sender to send the email again. (Now there are 2 copies in the Inbox!)
- Difficulty prioritizing
- Looking at, but not dealing with emails. This becomes an unproductive pattern.
- Email seems more like a curse than a benefit
Can you relate? I worked with many people over the years that suffer from email overload. It’s a key reason why they feel chronically disorganized and unable to focus on what really matters each day. The email just keeps coming.

Here’s my true confession: I used to be that way.

I would routinely let my Inbox balloon to about 2,500, then I’d start cleaning up email for a period, usually over a holiday break, and get back down to 50 or less. After a few years of this, I decided enough was enough and devised some strategies that would work for me.

This was more than 2 years ago. Since then I’ve never had more than 100 emails in my Inbox. As I write this I have 19 emails in my Inbox. Here are my 6 rules I follow to manage email.
1. Move everything non-essential out of your Inbox. What I mean is to have a separate email address for personal email, which includes email from your bank, insurance company, restaurants you like, etc. This puts only business-related email into your primary Inbox. Second-level business email should go into folders via Rules or into another Tab ala Gmail. I use the Gmail tabbed approach.
2. Be militant about unsubscribing to email you don’t want from Senders you no longer care about. Too many people are lazy about unsubscribing thinking, “I might like the next email I get.” (Even though they really don’t.) If you see value, keep it. If you don’t, throw it out. Simple rule: You should read all the email you get.
3. Block time out for email cleaning at least every other day. I make sure I have a few hours to mow through my Inbox every few days. I am not willing to let email pile up so I make it a priority.
4. Don’t use your Inbox as a reminder system. People leave email in their Inbox to remind them to do things. Use a Task Manager like Asana instead. Use email as a communication tool. That’s all.
5. As soon as you deal with an email, file it away. I file email like crazy all the time. As soon as I reply to someone, I file their email. After they reply, I file it again. Over and over, file, file, file. By the way, this requires that you have file folders for everything and everyone.
6. Delete email constantly. If I’m not filing it, I’m deleting it. Just as with Rule #5, refuse to let email linger.
If you’ll follow these 6 rules you’ll have a fighting chance at Inbox Zero.

The reason you want to do this is because it will lift a huge weight off your shoulders and you’ll realize the true power of email as the powerfully efficient communication and moneymaking tool that it is.

Once you’re there, vow to never go back to the way it was. Ever.

If you’d like more tips about dealing with email, get these two books: Getting Things Done by David Allen, and The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. These books cover much more than email, but their tips on this topic were instrumental to my approach.

Michael Neuendorff is an acclaimed Business Coach and Sales Trainer. Learn more about his business at http://www.buildandbalance.com.
April 19, 2016
I never finish anythin…

If you’re using your email inbox as a task list, you’re probably seeing it get out of control. Even if you’re flagging important emails and looking at your flagged email daily, are you feeling a little worn-down with how many emails you’re seeing? Seeing a long to-do list or a stack of actionable emails can leave you feeling like throwing in the towel.

You know that you can’t give up. You need to get through them because they were important enough to flag in the first place. The root of the problem is that it takes too much of your attention and decision-making skills to look at each one and determine the action needed.

Save your email as a task

In my blog post here: How to Ingrate Email with Task Management I write about integrating your email with a task manager. If you save an email as an actual task, then you can re-write the title and add notes to help you to remember what it is that you have to do. Wouldn’t it be much easier to look at a list of actionable tasks then a list of emails with vague titles?

You still may have a to-do list that’s long, but if you focus on your top 5 every day then you can whittle down your list over time. (If you list continues to grow because of too-full days, you may also want to look at delegating and outsourcing.)

Every task is an action

One great technique for a to-do list is to make every task an action. I.e., if you have an email from David titled: “Hey Robin, can we talk soon?” you need a task that’s more like: “Contact David and schedule a discussion”.

Here’s a great article about organizing your to-do list by emotion: Sort Your To-do List By Emotion. If I take the previous example and change it to this: “Contact David and schedule a discussion (Great Sense of Accomplishment)”, I would feel more motivated to get it done.

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April 15, 2016
How to Implement a Better “Getting Things Done” for Email
What does “productive” mean to you?

The first step towards productive email management may be to identify your goals. For most of us, it means a few things:
- Not missing important emails
- Not having to spend hours of our time picking out the important emails
- Quickly finding an email when we need it
- Being able to scan the inbox for important items
One popular productivity method is called “Getting Things Done” (or GTD), first made popular by David Allen’s book in 2001.

The GTD system requires that you empty your email inbox through utilizing an “action management system”. The flow goes like this:
1. Examine each email
2. Is it actionable?
3. If not,
  - trash it, or
  - move it to a “someday/maybe” list, or
  - move it to a reference list.
4. If it is actionable, determine if it will take less than 2 minutes. If yes, take care of the action. If not, delegate it or schedule it for later.
Here’s what I see are the problems with the GTD system:
- If you’re not on top of your inbox, it can grow out of control.
- So you need to make sure to:
  - Schedule time to stay on top of your inbox
  - Schedule time to deal with the task list that results from deferred items so that it’s not getting too long
  - Schedule time for your “someday/maybe” list, or else you’ll never get to it
Many people struggle with the GTD system because of the level of organization and time involved, so I advocate making a little tweak to this system.

You do need to start with looking at each email first, or at least a good representation of your inbox, and that’s because you’ll determine how you will categorize your email. Read my blog post about categorization here: How to Become a Pro at Managing Email Chaos.

Your “green” category emails are equivalent to David Allen’s “someday/maybe” emails, your “yellow” category emails his “schedule for later”, and your “red” category emails his “2 minute” emails.

Once you’ve determined how your emails can be categorized, you’ll use filters to keep the green category (or “someday/maybe”) emails out of your inbox, simplifying your daily inbox management process. I’ll be writing more on email filters later, but read this post to get the basic idea: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive. And now that your green category emails are out of your inbox, you should ideally block out some time on your calendar on a weekly basis to review these emails.

Your inbox is now smaller and easier to manage.

You’ll still need a regular routine to read those yellow and red category incoming emails and deal with them. As you move the yellow category (or “schedule for later”) emails out of your inbox, David Allen advocates implementing a method for reminding yourself to act on those tasks. If you have an email program that supports it, you can “snooze” the email or flag it for follow-up, or you can integrate your email with a task manager. (I’ll be writing blog post soon on task management integration with reminders, so check back.) If you’re a Gmail user, here’s a great post at TechRepublic: How Google Steathily Built a “GTD” Suite of Apps.

Your red category emails are your immediately actionable emails. However, you often cannot deal with these emails within two minutes or five minutes, and you may not have anyone to delegate to. So, these emails need to stay in your inbox, and they need to stay visible. The best way to keep them visible is to assign flags or stars to them, depending on your email program. Your daily routine should include sorting your inbox by flag and dealing with those high-priority emails that you had to defer because you needed more information, a response, or you just didn’t have a few minutes to deal with them.

If you struggle with organization, or even if you are a highly organized person, the most productive way to find the email that you need is to search for it. Hopefully, you’ve signed up for my email list and received my paper on “How to Find What You Need When You Need it”. If not, shoot me an email and I’ll send it to you.
March 29, 2016