PhotoCredit: Styles
Lifetimes ago, when I was a baby lawyer, I developed a deep anxiety of the phone ringing. It was pavlovian, of sorts. The phone ringing sent me in a spiral of worry as it inevitably meant more work. As a baby lawyer you are never short on work. I never felt on top of it all and the phone ringing signaled the problem was about to get worse.
Later in life the stress response didn’t serve me at all. Drastic action was required. I set my ringtone to PSY’s Gangnam Style which proceeded to make me laugh every time the phone rang. Now it’s our inboxes that cause unhelpful (but justified) anxiety. Ready for a change? Here is my step-by-step guide to Gangham Style your inbox.
Step One: Turn off all notifications, alerts, alarms, banners, home screens and any other form of email announcements. A new email does not warrant a trumpet flourish. Notifications are not your friend - they interrupt your focus and cause switching fatigue.
Step Two: Highlight all of your email in your inbox and mark UNREAD. Get rid of that nasty ticker telling you that you have 103,984,567 unread emails. You will never get to them, stop kidding yourself.
Step Three: Create an email folder “OLD” and move all email from your inbox into that folder. They are all still there for you. You are not deleting them. Stop telling me you can’t possibly do that. DO IT.
Step Four: Create two subfolders for your inbox: URGENT and IMPORTANT. From now on, any email that needs a response today goes into your URGENT folder. Anything else goes into IMPORTANT.
**You can go a level deep on this if you want to and create two additional subfolders: NOT URGENT and FUN. Anything you don’t really have to respond to can go into NOT URGENT (I call it the “no one will die if I don’t reply to this email” folder) and anything you want to read or peruse later goes into FUN.**
Step Five: Look at your URGENT emails and assess how much time you need today for those items and put that time on your calendar immediately. I like to have about 90 minutes in the middle of my morning to knock out those emails and do a quick sort of any new email.
Step Six: Set two calendar appointments daily: one for the morning to sort your inbox and one for the evening to clear through some of the IMPORTANT emails and likely sort through your inbox again. I like 30 minutes first thing in the day so I can see what in waiting for me and I like about 60-90 minutes in the evening which I often use as reading/thinking time if I don’t have a heap of pressing matters.
Step Seven: Set an amount of time every two weeks to have an email blast. This is optional. You can use this time to quietly sort through your OLD folder if you really want to (I wouldn’t). It’s great time just to weed through all your folders and delete (or move to the OLD folder) to keep things really streamlined.
BONUS#1: Unsubscribe to any email lists that are weighing you down, annoying you, too frequent or part of your past.
BONUS#2: Email doesn't have to suck. I like to play a great album or playlist as I clear email. It means I also get time in my day to listen to new music. A glass of wine helps in the evening as does a hot chocolate. Figure out how to make it fun.