Every morning many of us wake up to an email flood that fills our inbox with new messages. It’s overwhelming and usually results in spending many hours each week reading, sorting, and replying. When we don’t take the time to deal with email, our inbox unread message count climbs into the thousands or tens of thousands.
A Better Way
This endless flood of email messages started me on a path to find a better way to handle email. My ultimate goal was to make managing my email inbox as easy as possible based on how I work. There are many different strategies for efficiently managing email, including Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero and David Allen’s GTD method. Every strategy can work, but I knew the key was to find something that fit my thought process.
I created a list of the strategies and sub-strategies that I liked the best, then planned to make small changes gradually. This allowed me to master each change, make adjustments and improvements, and finally move to the next change.
Slow the Email Flood
The first and most important step I took was to reduce the number of messages that arrived in my inbox each day.