Email is the primary communication tool for the modern world. A nearly singular location where people know that they can reach you. Almost everyone has one and conceivably can be reached there. Emails pour into your inbox from everywhere, stores, newspapers, congregants, and coworkers. On any given day, we might receive hundreds of emails on a variety of subjects.
The challenge many of us face is how to actually deal with all of those inputs. That is where email Inbox Zero and one-touch email management is so essential. With these tools, we can make email work for us, instead of the other way around.
Let’s start at the beginning. What is an inbox and what are inboxes for?
An inbox is a place to store your captured items into a singular place to be dealt with at a later date.
To translate this into our email context, we capture our emails into our inbox into one place by giving out our email to others so they can reach us. If we gave them separate email addresses for every project, that would be infuriating. There are great reasons to have more than one email, but let’s stick with our situation here.
Once our emails are arriving into a singular location, we can deal with them when it suits us. We can read them when we want to, not when they arrive. As much as we feel like we have to check our emails constantly, they do build up until we choose to read them.
This essential quality of an inbox is powerful. It allows us to choose what we want to do with it.
So what is Inbox Zero?
Inbox Zero is the idea that you maintain zero emails in your inbox at any given time. Namely, that we process our emails so that they do not remain in our inbox.
This idea is the logical extension of our definition of inbox and how we should treat them. We should treat our email as an inbox and not as a task list.
All of us, at one time or another, read an email, decide we’re not going to deal with it now, mark it as unread and leave it to remind us next time to follow up with it. This is the trademark action of treating your inbox as a task list.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. Email:
- is not designed to be a task list
- is for other people to reach you, it is their task list for you
- is unending and our task lists should be remotely accomplishable
As a result, we need to separate out the tasks of task management and email. They interact but are not the same.
One-touch email is the system we should use to manage our email.
What is one-touch email?
One touch email is the idea of interacting with your email once. It no longer remains in your inbox but rather is dealt with and archived or sorted away.
There are three things that your email can include:
- A task for you to do
- An event to be aware of or attend
- Important information
That’s it. That is all that your email includes. Let’s go over each one.
1. A task for you to do.
Email often comes with follow up actions, write this, coordinate that, follow up with someone, or delegate this thing to someone else. Tracking those actions into a task manager which can (and probably should) contain all of your tasks is the best place for those actions to live.
Once this task is captured in the right place, your task manager, the email is no longer relevant. Archive it or sort it into the appropriate folder.
2. An event to be aware of or attend.
Tracking the events in our lives, especially for those who are really active, can be tough. That is why we store this information into a calendar! It is a single place that contains all of the timing-based information in our lives.
Almost everyone you know uses a calendar! Digital or on paper doesn’t really make a difference, though a digital calendar is often more useful (but less aesthetically pleasing, or so I’ve heard).
Once this event and the relevant information, like Zoom links are stored appropriately, the email is no longer relevant. Archive it or sort it into the appropriate folder.
3. Important information.
This one is more challenging because of the wide variety of information we receive on any given day. There are a lot of tools and mechanisms to store this information.
First of all, it is important to have a system to put that information into like project folders or notebooks (digital ones). I use Evernote for such a tool. But, regardless of whatever system you use, that is the place your important information should be held. A place that is easily accessible and easy to find.
In the end, the search function is decent on most platforms, so if you can’t find the information in your system (which ideally doesn’t happen) you can find it in your email.
Once this information has been stored appropriately, the email is no longer relevant. Archive it or sort it into the appropriate folder.
That’s it. That is how you manage your email.
The rest of it is about keeping the promise to yourself, following through on actually doing one-touch email management. It is tough and we all have bad habits. But just like with anything else, it is a practice, and you’ll get better at it.
Have a question on how to implement this? Want me to help you set it up? I’m available for consulting and I’d be happy to work something out for you and/or your organization! Reach out!