Lying to yourself doesn’t empty an Inbox

I’ve heard it said that you can lie to your friend and you can lie to your family, but you can’t lie to yourself. I have to admit that I’ve found people that are pretty good at lying to themselves, but that’s another story. But, if you want to win this Battle of the Inbox, you’re going to have to reach a high level of personal honesty! You’re going to have to be honest about true priorities, realistic about time expectations, and do a baseline gut check on what you really intend to do about any given message.

Have you ever been a part of designing a web site? I’m not talking about the graphic stuff or any of the code that goes along with web development. I’m talking about the process of gathering/creating the content. If you have, you’ll appreciate that this process may end up teaching you a lot more about yourself and your world than you had expected. Since email is such an important part of the way we communicate on both a personal and business level and it also can be an issue about which we get quite emotional. So, where do we go from here? The answer is waiting in your inbox, where hundreds or perhaps thousands of messages have now accumulated because you either don’t know what to do with them, or more likely won’t admit what you know should be done with them. O.K., enough of the Statement of Faith stuff for now. Let’s get back to some really practical thing.

Two Important Questions

Remember the “handling” rules earlier. Do the items in order, handle them one at a time, and never put anything back into the Inbox. To help you actually move these things off your plate and get them processed, there are two questions to ask of every item as you begin the handling process.

1. What is this?
2. What’s the next action?

Before you can know what to do with something, you need to know what it is. I think you’re tracking with me now. What is this? Once you know what it is, then you can determine how to handle it. That question turns the light on in what may otherwise be a dark situation. It leads you to the answer to the next question; “What’s the next action?” In order to make it easier to answer the second question, we’ll take a look at the four options for handling email. But since this is getting long, we’ll do that tomorrow.

Thanks,

Roger

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 10:41 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.