Getting email to zero

Getting email to zero

By Kelly on Getting Things Done

Many people consider that Black Belt with GTD is to get to zero emails in the Inbox on a regular basis. Why? Because it takes less effort, attention and energy to work from a place of zero than to keep things in the Inbox where some part of your brain has to refigure out what you've already figured out. Consider this: How many times have you opened an email, closed it, maybe even marked it as unread, then gone on to the next one. Then at some point you see that email again, maybe even open it again and have to think, did I respond to this one? Is this new? One suggestion to get a handle on what's in the Inbox is to first handle the backlog sitting in In, starting with what can get deleted. Sorting by Date, Sender or Subject can make that easier. If you have a sense that you have some old emails that you need to keep for archival purposes, and it's unrealistic to go through hundreds or thousands of old emails, then create a folder called something like Backlog or To Process--call it whatever you want to give it a place other than In. Once backlog stops grabbing your attention you'll be freed up to process what's new. I find the 4D's to be a great model for processing email:

* Delete whatever I don't need
* Do those I can do in less than 2 minutes
* Delegate anything I can hand off to someone else
* Defer anything that will take longer than 2 minutes to some kind of action folder or Task list

A grad of one of my seminars last week wrote to me about her experience implementing GTD with her email:

A funny thing to share...I was one of the ones with 3,000+ E-mails in my Inbox, so I followed your suggestion [about backlog] and created 2 files...2006 Before GTD and 2005 Before GTD and moved things more than 2 weeks old into those folders. Then, I worked on deleting, or moving more recent E-mails to tasks, or other folders as appropriate. I finished all of this VERY LATE last night. This morning, I logged in and watched and watched my "Inbox"...but there seemed to be a problem. The viewing panes were empty and weren't showing me any mail. So, I moved over to tasks and scanned those to see what I could work on in the moment -- while waiting for my screen to refresh. I did a couple of things -- went BACK to my "Inbox" and the screens STILL weren't "refreshed". I tried to look for a "refresh button" to clear up the problem...and it finally occurred to me that this is what an empty "Inbox" looks like!! I'd never seen one before! I had to laugh...