#A MESS HOW TO#
#A MESS ARCHIVE#

Put things you want to keep for reference into an archive. Put everything that you have to act on into whatever system you use to manage your to-dos, whether it's an old-fashioned list, a calendar, a bullet journal, or a task manager like Todoist. Instead, the idea is to move items out of your inbox into a place where it makes more sense to keep them.

Doing that still puts other people in control of your workflow. One of the things that's important to remember about inbox zero is that it's not about actually completing all the tasks in your inbox whenever you open it.

#A MESS HOW TO#

There are lots of good articles on how to achieve inbox zero. The aim of the system is to keep your inbox empty, with the result that doing so would eliminate all the stress and inefficiencies mentioned at the beginning of this article. Further, it's usually a lot quicker to blast through 25 emails in one sitting than re-opening your email 25 separate times for each new item.Įmpty your inbox, empty your mind: In 2007, blogger Merlin Mann coined the term ' Inbox Zero', which was his name for a system of email management aimed at minimizing the amount of time you spend worrying about email and maximizing the time you use on the tasks that are important to you. However, for most people one to three times per day is plenty to deal with everything that needs to be dealt with without anything burning down. Exactly how frequently you check will depend on your work and what you are using email for. Instead, check your email at regular but infrequent intervals. When you do this, you're handing over control of your workflow to anyone in the world who has your email address. However, it's far less efficient, so use a proper workstation when possible.īatch email activity: The worst way to deal with email is to jump into your inbox whenever the idea pops into your head or when you receive a notification. Doing email on your smartphone allows you to feel productive when you aren't at your workstation, giving you a way to temporarily fight the anxious sense that you should be working. Worse, it's tougher to drag and drop emails to where they are supposed to be. The tiny screen makes it harder to type quickly and accurately, and more difficult to take in lots of text quickly. It's nice that your phone has the power to tell you what's in your email, but it's a very poorly designed tool for actually processing it. Don't worry, you'll check it later.ĭon't use your phone for email: Since the invention of the Blackberry, people have been using their smartphones to deal with emails.

Unless you regularly get emergency email, you're better off just shutting off the notifications. emails, important and trivial, all give the same kind of notification, so your brain won't be able to distinguish real emergencies from spam. They make it difficult to focus on any one thing, which leads to multitasking, which leads to not actually getting anything done. Notifications are distracting and cause anxiety. Turn off your notifications: Unless lives depend on it, turn off your notifications. I researched what efficiency experts have to say about managing your email, tried their advice, and present to you what I found to be the best tips for how to make dealing with your email less stressful and more efficient. Since email became a big part of our lives, smart people have been figuring out ways to spend less time on it without losing the advantages of such a convenient communication system. The result is an anxiety-generating fiasco of inefficiency. And anyone can slip a new item onto the top of the pile, heralded by a distracting notification. A chain letter from your aunt sits atop an urgent invoice atop an itinerary for your holiday next month. But an unorganized inbox is basically a giant digital crate heaped with e-scraps arranged in the order they were received, rather than according to importance or urgency or any other reasonable organizational principle. We often just leave these things in our inboxes as reminders or a to-do list of sorts.

#A MESS ARCHIVE#

The email inbox can hold pretty much everything, so it seems like a natural archive for stuff we aren't ready to deal with but need to come back to, or aren't ready to delete forever.

A mess