How I Manage Inbox Anxiety
I have recently been decluttering my home, using the time over Easter to remove unwanted items from the house. I have also spent some time decluttering my mind…and now is a great time to start to declutter something that many of us use every day - our inbox.
I have a ‘zero inbox’ and I have often share this tool with my groups as a way of managing anxiety and overwhelm.
A zero inbox allows me to open my emails (I have three accounts because of the boards and committees that I belong to) and only see a few emails instead of the whole screen being full of emails I will never get to. Each morning when I open my emails I’m not overwhelmed, as I only have the ones that arrived overnight.
I can easily get rid of the stuff that doesn’t need me to deal with it and then start the day with what needs my attention.
So how do I do it?
When I first started I had 11,000 emails sitting in my inbox and was feeling completely overwhelmed. The idea behind creating a zero inbox was that when I open my inbox I only see the emails that have just come in rather than feeling weighed down by countless emails staring back at me.
I started by sorting my emails alphabetically and quickly going through them to decide what was totally irrelevant and deleted them straight away.
Unsubscribe from emails you no longer what to receive.
Create inbox folders to file my emails in (for example clients, events, travel, invoices, etc) and begun filing and archiving emails, keeping it as simple as possible makes it easier to find filed emails when you need them.
Give yourself time throughout the day to check your emails and respond to anything that can be answered in 2 minutes or less. Then delete or file.
Hit snooze - the snooze feature is a helpful tool that I often use, particularly when I can’t get to an email right away.
The benefit of having a zero inbox is that you don’t waste your time working through emails to find the important ones - it’s much easier to delete what's irrelevant and is also a great time to unsubscribe from the junk emails that fill up your inbox.