There has been a recent explosion of consultants and bloggers who claim to have the answer to your overloaded inbox, present company included. There are some like this person and this person who feel your inbox should be empty at the end of each business day so that you can have peace of mind heading home for the evening. There are people like this renaissance man who outsources his trivial email and only checks the important stuff a few times a day.
Then There's Stever
Most interestingly, there is Stever Robbins the “Get It Done Guy” who claims that “You Are Not Your Inbox.” I’m a fan of Stever and find his podcasts some of the best in class. He’s educated and well-respected, but I think he may have missed the mark a bit this time. The others mentioned above, while also highly quoted and revered, miss the mark in one special area of inbox management as well.
In my opinion, and this is what I tell my audiences whether they be 300 project managers from AT&T or hundreds of business executives in Philadelphia, you are, in fact, most definitely your inbox.
It Reflects Self
Your inbox is a direct reflection of who you are; there is no escaping that fact. When people ask me to help them do email better, I ask them about their laundry. I ask them what’s in their kitchen sink right at this moment. If your living room looks like the picture above at the end of each day, can you expect your inbox to look any different at the end of each day? Once we walk through the doors of our company in the morning, we somehow feel different. We dress a little nicer than we do on the weekends. We clean up our language a bit. And we’re hopefully trying to act just a little nicer than usual. The thing we can’t escape though is the core of who we are, our habits. If our desk at home is mess, so is the one at work. If we have a pile of laundry in the middle of our bedroom, so do we have a pile of unread emails piled in the middle of our inboxes. If we rush out at the last minute to get the kids off to school, forgetting homework and lunch boxes in the process, so do we rush off abbreviated emails forgetting to mention key points and deliverables.
It's Like The Bailout: No Good Answer
I wish I could offer a blanket panacea to this reality, but I can’t. No one can, although many would like to try to tell you otherwise. I can, however, and will give you some tactics that can help you, regardless of bad habits, get a quick leg up on making the inbox a more pleasant place to visit.
More Coming Soon
Stay tuned to future posts as I explain how to hotrod Outlook to save you oodles of time responding to emails and how to make sure you never have an email slip through the cracks again.
In the meantime, do you feel a greater peace of mind from this post or do you simply feel more frustrated realizing life ain’t easy after all?
This post is one from my "Email 50" project. The
goal is to publish 50 consecutive posts providing helpful advice on how
to do email better in this information overloaded world.
Photo credit: Emily
