Slaying the Inbox

A consistent theme through many of the conversations I have regarding productivity, work/life balance and time management focuses on the never-ending deluge of emails that many of us are receiving nowadays.  In addition to more and more email piling in, we’re being expected to and judged by how fast we can respond to said emails.

This is a constant battle that I fight on a daily basis.  The first thing I do when my alarm goes off is grab my iPhone and check what emails have come in over the past few hours.  This continues throughout the rest of the day and ends with a last check of my iPhone right before placing it back on the nightstand where I grabbed it at the start of the day.  I know, I know, the productivity cops are coming after me as we speak for saying the first thing I do is check email.  For me, it helps to set the pace for the day and allows me to prioritize the morning especially if something happened with a client.  On any given day I receive 200-300 emails and send upwards of 100+ emails per day.  Between my laptop, iPhone, and iPad, I ensure that I’m consistently plugged in and attempting to stay on top of my inboxes.

Of course, sometimes I fall off the wagon and fall deeply, deeply behind where I have to spend an entire day catching up.  Whenever this happens, I tend to fire up Merlin Mann‘s famous “Inbox Zero” talk.  Have you seen it before?  If not, check out the video below.  Though it is about an hour long, it is worth every second of your time, especially if you’re having problems organizing or keeping up with your inbox.

What I’ve found is that I can’t use the exact folders that Merlin suggests because I find that when I tried using a “Defer” and/or “Do” folder, I never followed up with the emails.  Also, after trying out a few different folder structures, I decided that what helped me process (and reference) email the fastest was to use the following folders for my primary inbox, which happens to be my New Marketing Labs account:

• External – this is for all communications that are not from a client or someone on the New Marketing Labs team.
• Clients – all client emails go into this folder.
• Internal – any email from a New Marketing Labs team member is kept in this folder.
• Misc. – any email that doesn’t nicely fit into one of the other folders or may be a personal note that I want to save for personal reference is stored here.
• Travel – because of how much I travel, I’m always receiving travel confirmations, updates and changes. Though I heavily depend on TripIt to keep my travel organized, I keep all backups here.

This allows me to quickly decide where an email needs to be stored instead of spending 5 seconds per email deciding exactly which of 100 folders it needs to go in.  It also helps me with trying to locate a reference email because of how fast email searches are nowadays and the variety of ways that your email can be sorted.

This is just how I attempt to slay the inbox.  How do you handle your email?

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Photo Credit: Christopher S. Penn