I’m free.
Finally free of the prison called my inbox.
We get hundreds of emails every day.
I only see a handful of them.
Talk about time freedom!
But even more than that, there’s a psychological freedom; and a sense of spaciousness and ease.
You can have that too.
Most entrepreneurs and business professionals get a lot of emails.
Here’s what most do: They dive into their inboxes first thing in the morning.
That’s bad.
Because your email inbox is some else’s agenda for your day.
If you’ve planned out your day, if you know what you value most, and if you know what your highest priorities are, your email inbox can easily hijack your day.
If you use your inbox to drive your day, you’re in even worse shape. You move in and out of email all day long. You feel like a little silver ball in a pinball machine. You end up exhausted, depleted, and wrung out.
I’ll use my very best Bob Newhart coaching: Stop it!
Some Basics
Let me share some tips and tricks.
First, get your email inbox to zero.
I worked with the CEO of a large music company who admitted to having 3300 emails in his inbox. That energy suck is dangerous. It’s like leaving the dome light on in your car on a cold winter night. Your battery just drains away.
Here’s a hack for getting to inbox zero right now: Declare amnesty. Create a email folder called Email Amnesty. Move your entire inbox there. Voila. You have fresh start with an empty inbox.
Now, second, with your new empty email inbox, commit to checking email no more than 3x a day. For example, create a block of time from 9am to 9:45am; another block of time from 1 to 1:30pm; and a final block from 4:15 to 5pm. (Committed block time is one of the most efficient ways to work on any task, especially email.)
Third, when you go into your inbox in your designated blocks, practice the 3 Ds: Do; Delegate; Delete.
- Do means do what the email asks you do (like respond).
- Delegate means forwarding on the email to your assistant, colleague or associate to do.
- Delete means delete from your inbox (or in the alternative, moving the email into a client or customer folder).
Your inbox is back to zero!
The Advanced Practitioner
Once you have these practices down, I have some graduate level strategies that will open up the prison gates for good.
- Get an assistant who’s job it is to review your email for you. (Yes, I know, sacrilege, especially for you lawyers reading this. No one can do it like you can. Except that you can create really clear protocols or standard operating procedures that your assistant can follow.)
- Have your assistant Do, Delegate or Delete following the protocols you establish.
- Have your assistant create a label for the emails that they want you to see. Then when you go into your inbox, you’re just looking at the labeled emails.
- Better yet, create a dedicated private email just for you; not available to the public. (I have two of these. One I share just with my closet friends; one I share only with my Inner Circle Coaching Clients.) Have your assistant forward emails that you need to see to your private box. This is where the magic is. Because now you’re just looking at a handful of emails from people you actually want or need to respond to!
- Once you’ve got an assistant trained on your email protocols, and once you have your own private email inbox(es), commit to staying out of the general email inbox. (This will be hard at first because you’ve gotten some good dopamine hits from all of that email chaos. But, you’ll soon discover a whole new sense of freedom.
Email is one of the single biggest time sucks for nearly every entrepreneur and business professional I work with. It dramatically reduces your productivity and performance and causes nearly unceasing stress and ovewhelm.
I did many years of hard time in email prison. You don’t need to.
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