Sorry I left you hanging yesterday on the last two of the three simple rules. I don’t want to take up any more of your already busy schedule than necessary. Just to make sure you haven’t forgotten (or worse yet, missed) the first rule, we started with “Handle the Items in Order”. So, we’ll continue from there.

Handle One Thing at a Time

This goes well with going in order. Finish processing the email you are working on before going to the next. Don’t do it half way and then move on. Deal with it decisively, and then move on. I could elaborate, but that would just start to be redundant so we’ll just move on.

Nothing Goes Back Into the “Inbox”

Your inbox should not be a place to store files. If there is a message that you will need to refer back to, consider one of the folders we created (hopefully) in the first blog about “Setting Up Your Email Workspace”. Your inbox is not the place to store those files. Likewise, if there is an email that seems “hard” to process, you can’t skip it and leave it in your inbox for another time… remember the previous rule. If you keep those things in your inbox, you will have to mentally process them every time you look into your Inbox. Just thing about it, when you look into your inbox now thing like “OK, this email is new, so I need to look at that; that one is there to remind me of X, so I can ignore that for now…”, and a great many other thoughts like that run through your mind. That’s complicated and annoying. It creates drag on your life.

See you tomorrow,

Roger

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Managing Your Inbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.