10. Inbox 2 Zero

Career stage: The lesson of how to manage my inbox came in early in my career, the first week of joining Microsoft back in 2007. I attended a full day of training on the topic of productivity, email, and calendar management. 6 months later I hadn't managed to implement any of it and was getting into a lot of information overload. This is when I discovered I had an ability to distill the entire book of contents down into a few simple steps, and convert the lessons taught on page into real-life changes that made sense to my everyday work. So, I started to share with my team, developing my own lessons, and broadening the audience to anyone that would listen.

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Challenge: How do you manage your daily communications, to-do list, priorities, and dumpster fires that are part of the modern-day work-life balance? With new tools like Teams being added to existing ones like Outlook, communication and information is both valuable and overpowering at the same time.

There is a surprising lack of quality training in this space, because you can't teach it to others if you don't do it yourself, and some people need 1:1 guidance they can't get from your normal corporate training style (follow TJ Walia as one of the few experts in this field). Having worked at many multi-national corporations, and as a consultant on complex projects that generate a lot of emails, I've managed to keep my inbox empty for the last 15 years. I do this without needing to spend hours reading, organizing, and filing.

Delivering this training to thousands of people, I've seen all kinds of approaches towards email management; mostly they are stress inducing coping mechanisms where the person is just trying not to forget an action, fail to reply to someone important, or lose a critical bit of information that might be useful in future. The tools themselves are not to blame, they do come with all the features you need,

After many iterations of my approach to delivering the training, gaining feedback, and seeing the success of those that really put the effort in, I discovered there are 6 steps that I can now recommend everyone tries first:

Step 1: The first thing to do is create an email folder called "Done” and start moving emails there when you know you have read it, actioned it, or ignoring it. If you aren't going to do anything else with this email, move it to Done. You may have other folders you like to use, but this one is the most useful as it allows any email to be kept, just not in the inbox.

Step 2: Now the hard part: go through all the emails currently in the inbox and one by one move to Done, or another folder. You might cheat and move everything that is more than 2 weeks old, reducing how much you must process individually. Once you get to empty you can sit back and breathe, staring at your first empty inbox - but now you have to keep it that way ;)

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Step 3: If it was as easy as step 1 and step 2, you wouldn't need the training. So, the next step is how to handle those emails that you don't want to move out of the inbox because you still have an action to take on them, or you are waiting for a reply. This is when you can create a ToDo folder. Every email that needs to have a reply, but you can't do it right now, gets moved to the ToDo folder. Once you have the inbox empty, go to the ToDo folder and start working through the items, moving them to the Done folder once completed.

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Note: when I first started using this technique, I was guilty of putting a lot of emails in ToDo, it would get up to 100 before I realized I wasn't “doing” anything with ToDo. Now I watch this folder and ensure it doesn't get higher than 20 emails. If I see it reaching 30-50 emails, I dedicate time focusing on these actions.

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Step 4: If you work in a role that must handle a lot of email, or perhaps your company culture results in most communications coming through email instead of other channels, then you might be fighting a torrent of information every day. Trying to keep that information out of the inbox manually will take hours per day. In this case you need to invest in the use of rules to automate moving emails to sub-folders that make it easier to read and find the information. The first thing to do here is create folder called "Inbox-Other", then create an email rule that moves all email into this folder, unless your name is on the To. Or Cc. line (you can be more aggressive and say on if on the To. line). This will help reduce most of the emails that do not need your immediate attention from entering the inbox, allowing you to continue practicing emptying the inbox. You will still need to go through Inbox-Other and empty it too, but as a 2nd priority.

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Step 5: So far, we have covered four essential email folders:

• Inbox
• Inbox.Other
• ToDo
• Done

If you need more folders to help you organize by project, customer, topic, or time period, I recommend you create the fewest reasonable amount, and I suggest you create them only as sub-folders under the Inbox. This ensures you can collapse them all down and reduce the visual fatigue of seeing lots of folders.

If your company works its business cycles based on Financial Year, or Calendar Year, you should also create a folder that helps organize your folders based on your current priorities. We are currently in FY23 (Financial Year 2023) and heading into FY24. As I approach FY24 with new priorities, projects, and goals, I will move those email folders that are still relevant from FY23 to FY24, the rest will stay where they are until I archive or delete them in the future.

If you already have a lot of folders, but don’t know how to manage them, you can move them to an archive folder and start again. The emails are still there for you to search, but your new folder structure will be much easier to maintain.

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Step 6: Steps 1-5 are all you need to get to Inbox-2-Zero. This final step is how you take more of those ToDo items and get them done. It’s also how you can manage your daily productivity to not only achieve more progress at work, but to prioritize your health and fitness, family time, and maybe even some Xbox time!

Calendar management is another skill that I had to learn as a consultant to help track every hour I needed to bill to a project. Some days I could spend 8-10 hours on a single customer project, or I may have a day where I work 1-2 hours on 4-5 different projects each. I also found it helpful to be proactive with my calendar, blocking out time to focus on specific tasks, including emptying the inbox or processing ToDos, but also for exercise, lunch, or helping out with after-school homework. Look up "Time Slicing" to learn more about this method.

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If you haven’t managed to keep along with all that text, I hope this simple diagram makes it easier to follow:

In my full training slide deck, I take each of the blue boxes and go deeper into the topic, using additional diagrams and screenshots to explain how to setup rules, process email, and generally approaching this problem from a different angle. Each trainee has a different set of problems to tackle. Some will pick up most of the steps but not all, whilst others may just need one of these steps to see a real difference in their stress levels.

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What I Learnt: People who are too busy already can't prioritize taking time out to take a new approach to the problem. Using a simple method with basic steps helps them take on one or two small changes and incrementally improve the way they work. Eventually they may find the joy in having an empty inbox, or they may choose the effort is not worth their time and continue to use other coping mechanisms - but at least they tried it!

Having delivered this training to thousands of people, and having hundreds of them tell me how impactful it was, this information was useful enough to write it up as a book and publish it as a Kindle eBook:

Amazon.com: Productivity Field Guide: A practical guide and untold secrets of productivity and communications eBook : Diver, Richard: Kindle Store

I'm also inspired to write a book about prioritization, as that is really what a lot of productivity comes down to: ruthless prioritization with dedicated action.

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Join me next time as we look at the "Modern SOC Architecture".