chrisbrogan.com - Latest Comments in Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Samlacey — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:38:13 -0000

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Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

youtube downloader — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 04:59:41 -0000

Delete the hell out of your email. Answer what needs answering, but don’t keep things around for “someday.” At the worst, stick something in your calendar to revisit an idea, but otherwise, delete.

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Daniel, the Real Estate Zebra — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:05:33 -0000

I'm with you, Chris. I have a tough time not peeking at my email. Especially since it gets pushed to my BlackBerry. I have been pretty good about checking my project list, but I need to get better about putting things on the list. That is where I tend to fall down. All in all, your post has helped me organize myself quite a bit. My Gmail inbox isn't quite so scary, anymore.

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

joshpaul — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:18:03 -0000

I truly believe there's an opportunity to create a solution using technology. The approach I may take is Latent Semantic Indexing and Bayesian filtering to create a process similar to a spam filter, but for items that need attention now vs. soon vs. later.

Would you use such a tool?

Thoughts?

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Sonia Simone — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:56:12 -0000

This is such a good discipline, I did very well with it for about the first two years I did GTD, but both of my major email boxes are currently completely shot to hell.

Like anything else, it requires commitment and focus, neither of which I am willing to spend on my email box at the moment. I should, because there's a good payoff in mental health & productivity, but nonetheless, I don't.

Maybe I will take some inspiration from you today and get on it. :) I like Merlin Mann's technique of just declaring amnesty and deleting everything in the InBox. I don't have the courage to do that, but I might create an amnesty folder and move everything there, to be able to start fresh.

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

jessmcculloch — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:00:40 -0000

Sorry hyperlink didn't work! Here it is: http://zenhabits.net/2007/0...

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

jessmcculloch — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:59:38 -0000

Ah, the goal of an empty inbox. I aim for it all the time. You're right, you have to be cruel and rather than thinking "I'll save it for later" think "Where else can I get this if I need it again later?"
I found this article from Zen Habits helpful when thinking about cleaning out my inbox(es!)

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Linda R. Moore — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:07:27 -0000

I stopped having my email program on all the time when I realized it was stopping me from actually working. I'm not down to zero yet--I hate to rush personal emails--but I'm a lot better about things than I used to be. And I think I'll get to zero, but for me the check once/twice a day thing came before the desire to get down to zero.

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Adam Boettiger — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:16:23 -0000

Hey Chris,

The Calendar really needs to be a sacred place, not just for throwing stuff into. Getting stuff out of your Inbox is great, but I've found it works best to use IWantSandy http://www.iwantsandy.com/ and just forward the email with a tickler date if you want it to float back to you at a later time. Then just delete it from your Inbox. It's not just a great way to procrastinate, it's a wonderfully effective tickler system that you can loop in to your cell phone with SMS alerts, email etc.

Adam

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Adam Gershenbaum — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:39:33 -0000

Ahhh pardon the gross misspelling of my own last name it is late!

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Adam Gershenabuam — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:37:55 -0000

Email management seems to be a hot topic in the past week.

Try the www.xobni.com email plugin. It really has changed the way I view my email box. It is no longer a vast pit where email gets tossed and disregarded. It is now an information library that is not bound to folders and rules. I highly suggest checking it out and have an invite if you need one.

I have light days of 15 or less emails but have some days where I get 60 and sometimes over 100 emails in a day. Best advice you have given is to not to be a crazed inbox checker. Anytime I close the inbox and refuse to peek, I get much more steady stream of work in. But I admit I don't practice that technique more times then none. It is part just wanting to know what is going on at all times, part I appreciate when someone gets back to me quickly and try to respond to my emails quickly, and part a lot of emails I deal with require a quick response.

Re: Taming the Inbox- One Week Later

Jared Goralnick — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:24:50 -0000

Chris,

Was late to the game in your last post, but I agree with you that the biggest difficulty is forcing yourself not to check. Since I pretty much run a whole business focused on helping people to stop checking email (no really, remember me? I was the guy who had the cards at SXSW that said "STOP CHECKING YOUR EMAIL"), I figure I can add some other little trinkets...

* Turn off auto-checking on your cellphone--since that's a hack that a lot of people use to get around the not-checking their email on their computer (how to do that)
* For Outlook Exchange people, switch to Work Offline
* Use programs like Writeroom (Mac) or Darkroom (PC) -- since you'll be free from some distractions
* Consider programs like LeechBlock which will limit your access to sites like Gmail within Firefox
* You could also try AwayFind once it comes out of private beta -- since that program routes any urgent messages to you via SMS (or to someone else) if you decide not to check your email for any length of time [note: that's my product]

Hope that helps a little--you're dead on that not checking email all the time is the biggest step toward being able to manage email. Then when you do check it you're able to batch through all the messages...