Slow the Onslaught and Eliminate the Vast Hordes of Emails in Your Inbox!

Posted in Goals & Productivity on January 22nd, 2008 No Comments

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Are you sitting in front of your screen reading this when you should be clearing out the hundreds of emails that have accumulated in your inbox? Perhaps you’re like me, a web geek–your email’s out there all over the net, so you have emails coming in from all corners of the world! Or maybe your office Outlook account has 72 project folders with to-do items from last October still in waiting!

Well no more! Leo Babauta has written an awesome guide to kicking email where it hurts over on Tim Ferriss’ Lifestyle Design Blog: 10 Steps to Become an Email Ninja

Leo walks you through setting up an AWESOME filtering system, and then discusses the major reasons why we keep so much junk in our inboxes:

Many times the reason an email is lingering in our inbox is because there is an action required in order to process it. Instead of leaving it in your inbox, and using the inbox as a de facto to-do list, make a note of the task required by the email in your to-do system … a notebook, an online to-do program, a planner, whatever. Get the task out of your inbox. Make a reference to the email if necessary. Then archive the email and be done with it. This will get rid of a lot of email in your inbox very quickly. You still have to do the task, but at least it’s now on a legitimate to-do list and not keeping your inbox full.

Read 10 Steps to Become an Email Ninja over at the 4-Hour Workweek blog.