Hi Reader,

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Welcome to this week’s Rev Up for the Week, where each Sunday at 4.05pm I deliver you a productive or positive idea for the week ahead. Last week I was coaching some folks on ‘inbox zero’ and some of the ‘Ninja Email’ principles from How to be a Productivity Ninja. As well as being what I coach, it’s what I’ve practiced myself for the last 15 years or so.

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There are huge benefits to the approach: when you’re not keeping hundreds of emails in your inbox like they’re your pets, you’re much less likely to miss stuff. And having a sense of clarity and control reduces stress - you’re safe in the knowledge that whilst there might be still things to do, or things you want to spend more time reading, there aren’t crucial things where you’re about to drop the ball.

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That said, I think the idea of ‘inbox zero’ is a bit misunderstood, and here’s why.

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Email (like Teams or Slack or Whatsapp) is ultimately just a medium - a way to exchange information. The point of inbox zero is not to become good at email. The point of inbox zero is to get out of email, to make space for what matters. The real work we do – the stuff that makes a difference or makes us famous in our jobs – is almost always the stuff that happens outside of our inboxes. Inbox zero is simply an approach that helps us close down the inbox more often and with a bit more confidence.

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So if the goal is to get out of the inbox and do brilliant work, what does that mean in terms of where to spend our time on inbox management? Well here are a few quick Do’s and Don’ts that I try to stick to:

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• DO get your inbox to zero regularly
• DON’T worry that it needs to be at zero all the time. That would mean living in the inbox like whack-a-mole (I’ll often have two days’ worth of emails piled up and then get it back to zero).
• DO have good folders for the stuff you’re still working on
• DO make it easy to file away the stuff you don’t need
• DO cheat – the point isn’t to do it perfectly, it’s to get things out of your inbox and out of your mind so that you can focus on what matters. If that means bulk-deleting or bulk-filing things to save time, then do that (you can set your ‘deleted items’ folder in Outlook to only empty every couple of months, if you want a safety net, too).
• DON’T spend any time getting your ‘sent items’ to zero
• DON’T waste time sorting our reference folders – they don’t need to be neat, and you can use the search function to find what you need anyway
• DON’T bother keeping your personal email at zero, unless you particularly need the same peace of mind there (I practice ‘inbox infinity’ for my personal gmail)
• DON’T check email all the time
• DO process email (ie. make the decisions) every time you’re in your inbox
• DO use rules to automate the job (for example, emails with certain subject lines or from certain people can be automatically filed into folders)
• DON’T focus on being good at email
• DO focus on being good at the stuff that matters.

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Have a great week,

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Graham

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PS – did you know, my company Think Productive can come in and help your whole team to get their inboxes to zero, or master Microsoft Teams? If you want to know more, hit reply and I’ll send you some details. It’s a cost-effective way to reduce stress and boost productivity in just three hours (and tackling real work while you learn, too).

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