"Inbox Freedom: Breaking the Chains of Digital Overwhelm

This week, I’m exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing. 

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Script | 362

Hello, and welcome to episode 362 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

How often do you feel overwhelmed? It’s a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved. 

A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don’t have any control over what arrives in there—that’s out of our control. 

The issue here is we have it collected, and that’s often a weight off our minds, but there’s a sense of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it. 

If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues. 

This week’s question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines.

So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager’s inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes?

Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question. 

This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything. 

On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you’d like to do can be put into your notes app. 

Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward. 

There’s a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better. 

When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it?

An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it’s an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question. 

So, it’s actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day. 

The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It’s from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there’s a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly. 

Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son’s sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner. 

It’s not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it?

The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It’s often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you’ve eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox. 

This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won’t have time to clear it. 

Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they’re going to hate you for responding instantly. Now you’ve given them more work to do. 

And let’s get real here, if something’s genuinely urgent, they’re not going to email you are they? They’ll call you. 

The second part of this process is to set aside time each day for dealing with your actionable messages. 

This is where you open up your email’s Action This Day folder and begin with the oldest one and work you way down the list. It’s at this point you will thank yourself for not responding to all those quick and easy emails. 

If all you have in your Action This Day folder are emails that require a lot of thinking and work, it’ll be a painful experience. If instead you have a wide variety of emails to deal with you build momentum and and plough through them quickly. 

And that’s it. A two step process. Through out the day, between sessions of work, clear your inbox by asking two simple questions: What is it, what do I need to do with it. If you need to reply, read or review something, throw it into your action this day folder. 

Then later in the day, settle down and go through your Action This Day folder and clear as many as you can. As long as you are starting with the oldest first, you’ll never be very far behind. 

Next up is your tasks inbox. 

This is a little different from your messages or email inbox because you control what’s put there. Unlike emails and messages where you have no control. You cannot control who is sending messages to you. 

The challenge here is to be ruthless about what gets into your system. 

Throughout the day, it’s easy to throw all sorts of things into this inbox. You may have heard someone recommend a book that sounded interesting, so you throw that in there. You may have seen someone with a colourful umbrella and you decide it’s time for you to get yourself one. 

Then there are all those ideas about redesigning your kitchen, or cleaning up your notes app or a thought about getting some Christmas cards printed with your name on them--I’m not sure if that’s still a thing. 

Your inbox is the gateway to your system, so it’s perfectly fine to throw anything and everything in there. Where you want to be ruthless is what you allow into your system. 

Processing your task manager’s inbox again has a few questions.

The first is: what is it? Then, what do you need to do with it? 

For example, you may have realised that your passport expires in the next ten months. So you have a task in there that says “renew passport”.

That’s good. But is it enough. I know if I come to a task that says renew passport I’m going to ignore it. Why? Because behind that simple “renew passport” is a lot of stuff I don’t know about.

The last time I renewed my passport was ten years ago. The passport office will undoubtedly changed the system since then. So what’s the real task here?

It’s to find out what I need to renew my passport. 

So, I would change the task to “find out what I need to renew my passport” and then decide when I will do that. Do I need to do it this week? Next week? Or perhaps next month? 

And that’s the third question, when will I do it? 

Once decided, I drop it into its appropriate folder. 

You will often have some obvious tasks in there too. It could be something like sending a quote to a prospective customer. So you add a task “send quote to Drax Enterprises into your inbox. 

Yet, is it that simple?

This might be a potential big multi-million dollar contract. One you need to discuss with your boss first. So, what is the task? It’s to talk with your boss about what discounts to offer. So you can change the task to “Discuss with boss Drax Enterprises quotation”, add a date you will do it—perhaps tomorrow—and place the task into your This Week folder. 

The danger of not rewriting tasks with the real next step is you will ignore the task because you are unclear about what really needs to happen next. When you process your inbox, you have an opportunity to get clear about what needs to happen next. 

Once you know that, you will be less likely to skip it. 

I know this all sounds complex, but if you step back and look what you are doing, you are asking yourself three simple questions.

What is it? What do I need to do with it? And when will I do it? 

I’ve found that if you apply these questions every time you are in an inbox, it quickly becomes natural. 

You also get better at triaging your task manager’s inbox. This helps you to keep your task manager clean and tight. The less you allow in there, the more focused you will be and much less susceptible to picking the easy tasks leaving yourself with only the more time consuming ones later in the day. (Something you want to reverse—remember “Eat The Frog”)

And that’s it, Stephen. Keep things simple, run through the questions and be ruthless about what gets into your task management system. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me no to wish you all a very very productive week.