How to handle your overloaded inbox

The first step comes from Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week and it’s that you shouldn’t feel guilty...

From Ferris: “Recognize that you receive too much information. It’s not your fault. Just accept that there is more information than time, and that it’s increasing every day.”

Ferriss offers “three ways to deal with e-mail overload. You can ‘live by reaction’ and feel increasingly stressed and confused. You can opt out by not reading anything. Or you can practice ‘bit literacy’ by getting ‘some information - the right information - without trying to get all of it.’”

The third option is a great way to go.

Your job probably means you receive a whole host of e-letters and bulletins that you need to whittle through to find the useful ones.

Some is appalling and largely pointless. This stuff should be ditched immediately.

But that still leaves you with a ton of stuff, a more manageable ton, but still enough to stress out your inbox.

So, of this good stuff, you can then divide it into ‘worth scanning’ and ‘solid gold’.”

E-mails worth scanning tend to be from sources that reliably deliver at least some relevant information.”

But...

Solid gold e-mails are from those rare sources that provide useful tips and insights every single time.

Put these ‘solid gold’ emails to the side. Because I am confident the information in them will be useful and informative, I want to give them the time they deserve.

It’s the ‘worth scanning’ emails that I go through first. Quickly scanning them to see if there’s something inside the email that could warrant it being promoted to solid gold status.

If a quick scan fails to pull anything out of the email; it’s deleted.

It’s then time to turn to the ‘solid golds’ and read them, making notes if appropriate or filing them away for later reference.

Get the idea and then move on

However, what’s to be done if you’re still being drowned in email, even though you’ve been so selective?

Follow the Power of One rule. Scan your solid-gold e-mails until you find one good and useful idea - an idea you can implement immediately. Then stop reading.

Remember, you don’t have to know everything - or even most of what there is to know - to succeed at most endeavours.
So, on reading through the email, once you hit upon an inspiring idea you’re done and you can get on with putting that idea into action.
Remember: get rid of the rubbish (and don’t feel guilty), sort the good into ‘worth scanning’ and ‘solid gold’, pick up one important idea, and then move on…