You are the supreme ruler over your email inbox! You GOT this!

It happens to everyone, being swamped with a full inbox after a holiday trip, a busy day of back-to-back meetings and they pile up, or you ignored it for a week, and now it looks like a mountain of email. If you get emails a lot, this experience must be overwhelming. Whether they are invitations to meetings and events, inquiries, ads, notifications from subscriptions, promotions, and more, chances are your inbox is already like a laundry basket that keeps getting higher every single day. It also contains to-do list items waiting to be processed. You know that it’s calling for your attention. That little number that indicates unread messages is a constant reminder. Maybe you avoid it? Maybe ignoring it will make it go away?

According to Mitchell Goss in his article in Forbes – “The emotional burden of attempting to keep up with this never-ending onslaught of digital messages—and the fear that one may miss something critical—creates anxiety and stress. There are studies that show constantly refreshing your mobile device for new messages triggers the same neurotransmitters in the brain as pulling the lever of a slot machine.”

Thus, you can either allot time to face it and start organizing, or just let people have the impression that you are unorganized, unproductive, and less likely to respond to their emails.

If you want to clean out your email inbox and keep it clean, it starts with two concepts:

1. Email doesn’t live in your inbox, it’s only there until you read it, then you move it to its appropriate location. In this approach, it makes sense why they named it “inbox” because it just came “in” and it’s waiting to be processed.

2. Only touch the message once, in a process I’ll call the 4D approach. You’ll evaluate each message in your inbox, and for each one you either: Deal with it, Defer it, Delegate it, or Delete it. In all cases, you’ve also moved it out of your inbox. Lets dig into each of the 4 D’s

DEAL WITH IT

If the email will take 2 minutes or less take care of, deal with it right now. “Skim this document.” “When should we meet?” “Did you hear from Jenny?” “What happened in the meeting” Whatever it is, if it will take you only 2 to 3 minutes, do it now, then archive or delete the message out of your inbox.

DEFER IT

If this email is something that’s going to take more than 2-3 minutes, defer it, then move it out of your inbox. There’s 2 main scenarios which you’ll run across most frequently.

1) The email will take more 2-3 minutes to respond to:
Work gets done through email, not all of them are quick responses. I keep an “Action” folder. I move all emails that I can act on right now but need more minutes to this Action folder. Once I’ve finished processing my inbox, I close my inbox and open my Action folder, and work from there. This is a huge help to keep all the emails you need to “do” something on in one place, so you can work through them much faster.

2) I need this email later:
We can move these emails out, but we need them to come back at the right time in the future. There’s so many examples of these kind of messages:
”My team is busy now, but we should be able to look at that late next week".
”There’s a problem with your order, call back during customer service hours” (2 days away)
“Remember to send me your money for tickets to the show by next week.”
“They’re going to be doing construction on the road in 2 months.”
”The bus/train schedule will change a month from now”
”Your bill is due in 2 weeks”
and so many more. I use one of 3 tools to move them out of my inbox now, but will bring them back at that future time.

Tools to Defer:
In Gmail, it’s called the “snooze” feature. You snooze the message until whatever date/time you select, then it will automatically show up at the top of your inbox again at that time. I love this feature and use it all the time.
In Outlook, you can right click on the message and select “Follow Up”. It will create a to-do list item that will automatically show up or be due at the future date/time you select. This system is a bit clunky, so I never use this, and prefer to use Followupthen below, but I share this because some offices have sensitive internal email policies, and if you are not allowed to send email outside the organization, Outlook’s feature may be an option for you.
For all email accounts on any platform, use FollowUpThen.com. This is my favorite and most used tool. I use it across all my email accounts, both work and home. If you need that email back in 2 days, you can simply forward the email to 2days@followupthen.com, and the system will email it back to you exactly 2 days later. You can try it now. Flip over to your email and send a message that just says HI in the subject to 1minute@followupthen.com. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll see it back and how this works. There’s great instructions on the site to help you understand how it works and it’s not complicated. If a message comes back and you’re still not ready for it, you can click a shortcut which pushes it further out, or forward it again, so it doesn’t get lost. You can even put the time period in BCC which will schedule the reminder to come back to you at the same time you send the email. The service is free until you start to use it heavily. I didn’t pay for it for the first 2 years.

DELEGATE IT

If the email isn’t for you or it’s something that someone else needs to do, delegate it. Send it to whom it should be delegated to. Or, you might even want to set up a filter that directly catches the message like this once it’s received and immediately forwards it to whom it’s due. Delegate it, and move it out of your inbox.

DELETE IT

You read the message, and there’s nothing more to do on it. Delete it or save/archive it and move it out of your inbox. Learn to let go of your emails. There’s nothing left to be done on this email, so it doesn’t need to be in your inbox anymore.

You can do this anytime, anywhere: This process works wherever you check your email. You can even start this process in your free time while you are on your smartphone if you like. Developing it as a routine a few times a day, and then getting out of your inbox completely until the next time you run through this 4D process will help your batch your email processing, and allow you to do more meaningful tasks besides email during the rest of the day.

Hot Tip: Don’t obsess about this. You may not get down to zero messages everytime, but atleast once a day you should be able to get there.

Like what Nicolas Carlo said in this Medium article – “The biggest valuable change is to be able to decide quickly. Don’t let emails stack into an inbox that is just becoming a crowded TODO-list in itself. Don’t lose time trying to organize and classify emails instead of just treating them.” Don’t allow your inbox to be a source of stress.

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I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that I was going to have a harder life that was likely 10-20 years shorter than normal. I’ve lived my best life every day since then, because you only get one chance to live it. I created Productivity Gladiator because I saw what a difference it made to share small and specific actions you can take right now, right away, to achieve better work life balance, be more productive, and live your best life right now, today, not wait until retirement. I want you to start doing the things you WANT to do, not get stuck chasing what you NEED to do. If any of this resonates with you, send me a note. It brings me joy to share this passion with you.