I am now in my 33rd year of using email, but the notion of achieving "inbox zero" has been an impossible dream for the majority of that time. Yet, about 5 years ago, I realized that I could not continue any longer and that doing more of the wrong thing made me feel defeated by something I thought I should be able to fix. Never licking the problem was no longer an option, I decided.

Instead, I committed to figuring out where my bottlenecks happened and why my organization construct did not empower me. The compelling part was the realization that my LACK of a proper system was disempowering me, disadvantaging me, and leaving me in a perpetual state of always letting myself and others down while treading water just to stay in the game.

James Clear's most famous quote from his book Atomic Habits rings true: "We don't rise to the level of our goals - we fall to the level of our systems". And, the more I saw friends and colleagues who all suffered the same challenge - riding the hamster wheel every day just to keep the messages flowing so that we could rise and repeat again the next day, the more I realized that the problem was epidemic. One friend showed me his inbox had 18,000 messages in it! I needed a system. WE needed a system.

It took codifying some basic principles to function by conceptually and then identifying a repeatable action sequence that could be enacted daily. It has been a few years now following the system, now automatically, and with that success behind me I would like to share the approach - the system. Email can be a very personal thing - what worked for me may not work for you, but if nothing else, it's worth a little review. May my words inspire!

First, the principles. These came about at probably the worst state of my email in years - a crushingly endless list of months of email threads that contained promises and projections that I hopelessly could not fulfill, more messages arriving hourly, and no end in site for how to deal with the chaos. I realized that I needed to formulate a decisive approach. Here's how it went:

1. ARCHIVE ALL

I decided I would start with a very quick scan through my email inbox just to make sure there wasn’t something truly urgent that had been missed - and by urgent, I mean genuinely critical. If you try this and if you are like me, you will be painfully surprised by missed connections and lost opportunities - I realized I just had to let them go unless there was a shadow of a chance that something could be rescued. Naturally, if there was something contractual that obliged me to keep and act on, it was kept. Otherwise, there I went - archiving everything whose reply was WAY overdue, out-dated and essentially hopeless. If something re-ignites in the future, I knew I would have have an archive to draw from.

In my scan I decided to look back a maximum of two months looking for the easter eggs of messages that actually had or might still have relevance. The easy ones went quickly. I asked:

• should this message have gone to someone else anyway? If so, BOUNCE those (i.e. forward them immediately to someone more suitable).


• is this message part of a well-intended subscription or newsletter that I never have time for? Open them and UNSUBSCRIBE - if the interest is high enough, I can always rejoin or just enjoy the podcoast version.

I decided to NOT scan farther back - I avoided that rabbit hole because I knew it would swallow me whole and would result in me abandoning the goal at hand: INBOX ZERO

And, I reminded myself: 'look, you are archiving - not deleting'. This gave me comfort knowing that what I was putting out of site was not lost forever. I focussed on preserving ONLY high opportunity or high-importance messages that still had relevance. I narrowed the focus so tightly so as to only keep about 20 messages. Then, I created a folder called "TEMPORARY" and saved these top 20 or so messages to the new TEMPORARY folder. My goal was to preserve and isolate them; to recognize the 'signal amongst the noise'. When done, I decided I would subject this small block of preserved messages to the 'new way' defined below.

Everything else was selected en masse and moved straight to the archive, never to be looked at again unless someone screamed for a response or I needed to retrieve an old message for reference.

That's how one preserves historical email that "might" contain something important. YET, that’s how one gets to that glorious target of "inbox zero".

Of course, THAT is the easy part. But it is satisyfing. Literally NO messages in the inbox!

2. COMMIT

Next, I needed to define the SYSTEM for dealing with all the new email that would start and continue to come in.

I decided that my first commitment would be simple: To end every single day back at inbox zero so things never get ahead of me again.

Ever.

Next, I committed to establishing a system and to follow it religiously.

To complement that 2nd commitment, once I drafted the new system, I would treat the 20 messages I preserved in the TEMPORARY folder as if they were newly arrived emails, all to be treated to my assessment under the new way.

3. MAKE RULES

There is only one way to stop things from spiraling out of control again: you need a decision-making flow that always results in messages being cleared from an inbox.

Here is that magic flow of rules below that I came up with. THIS was to be the new SYSTEM that would govern my inbox and stop me from having to "procrastinate" or delay handling every future message.

To test my rules, I opened that TEMPORARY folder and embraced the NEW WAY.:

The New Way

The Calm After The Storm - A System For Processing Email

I opened each of those 20 messages in succession from the TEMPORARY folder and it went like this:

First:

• DELEGATE - everything possible! Take the email, and if it is not directly actionable by me, then turn it into a task assignment to a fellow team member or assistant or contractor (because it is THEIR job anyway)? Stop being possessive with the false notion that 'only I can do this item' Stop being a bottleneck and either assign the email content as a task or even better, simply forward the original email so it is someone else's responsibility - and archive your copy immediately.
  
  This way, you are assured that the task is accounted for in your tasks assignment ticketing system or that it does not need further attention from you. If you do not have a task assignment system, no worries, open a text file or a doc and make a small dated entry under a heading called "Waiting", stating the date, who and what was just removed from your direct input. After you complete all delegations, your inbox will contain only messages that only YOU can deal with. If you have too many, maybe you need to hire help - just sayin'!

Next:

• DELETE or archive everything that does not materially move your life or business objectives forward. This is key - keeping such messages just clogs your flow and clouds your attention. Status updates. Alerts that do not require action. Updates from team members that do not require more than a "thank you" reply.

Then:

• DO anything immediately required by the email, meaning right NOW, but only if it can't be delegated AND which actually matters (but only if it will take 5 minutes or less). Importantly, do not let your day get eroded by an endless stream of these 5 minute tasks. Set a time each day for processing mail so that you don't get bogged. Once you have done items like this, immediately archive the email.

Lastly:

• SCHEDULE everything else so it is OUT of your inbox and now in your Calendar (because you have one, right?!) or your Task List (again, because you have one, right?) - slated for your work periods. Slate the work for blocked time in your work day specifically set aside for scheduled work.
  
  When it comes time to do the work, it will not be performed out of your inbox - it will be performed out of your TASK management system or checklist or calendar. If there are attachments associated with the message, these must go to a project folder in your Drive or they must be attached to your Task management system.
  
  So, now that you have "scheduled" the work outlined in the email, move the email to your archive. Your email program is a place to receive and send communications, not a place to store future work.

That's it. No email will be left. You have completed the live run of your new system using 20 messages that have been clogging your inbox.

As a final step today, DELETE the 'TEMPORARY' folder. You don't need it anymore. Moving forward, simply apply one of the 4 filters to ALL future messages to PREVENT inbox clog ever again.

END EACH DAY having cleared the inbox - There is no need to be dragging the email ball in chain for another day.

Voila! My Temporary folder was gone, my inbox was clear and I had achieved a zen-like satisfaction knowing that I could repeat this process. I was elated!

I later learned that Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, had a way of assessing every issue for its importance and urgency - this resulted in a kind of filtering system that proved highly effective. The similarities to my email filtering system are a near-perfect match.

Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Matrix

To this day, years later, I rarely deviate from the 4 filters outlined above and I rarely leave my console with anything remaining in my inbox. That doesn't last long of course - as soon as I walk away more messages arrive!

But, having a shutdown routine that feels like closure each day is very settling. Additionally, people who I used to leave wondering if I had fallen off the face of the earth discovered a new me - highly responsive - organized - meticulous - focussed. Ahh... (should have thought of this 33 years ago, right?!)

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