What Does your Inbox tell you about your Life?

Or one could ask: Does the number of e-Mails in your inbox relate to your level of stress?


David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, would say it does.

If you are using your inbox correctly, NOTHING should ever remain there once you have looked at it. Think of your physical mailbox at home. We don't allow letters to pile up in the hundreds or even thousands. We don't take a letter out of the box, look at in, and put it back in, thinking "I'll get to that later, let me see what else I got today."

Then why do most of us do this with e-Mail?


There could be a number of reasons:

1. We don't stop to ask ourselves (sometimes it requires forcing yourself to ask): What does this e-Mail entail? Can I delete this? Am I being asked to do something? Is there information here that I need easy reference access to in the future? Etc.
2. We don't respond immediately, even though it would take just under 2 minutes.
3. We have no system outside of e-Mail where we organize our decisions, our actions, our projects. We have no easy reference archive to keep any and every document or piece of information that we might need in the future.

What does this cause?

1. As items pile up in our inbox (we could include any of life's inboxes, such as voicemails, physical piles of paper on the desk, business cards that are still in our briefcase from our last conference) our minds lose track of what needs to be done. We KNOW that there are things to be done, but we have no order or priority that guides our use of precious work time.
2. We waste time by looking over hundreds of e-Mails again and again trying to guess what might be priority at the moment or searching for that one invitation we misplaced. The very fact that you look at something twice shows a lack of mental discipline. Chet Holmes in his award winning book The Ultimate Sales Machine shares what he calls The Six Steps to Great Time Management. Point #1 concerning e-Mail is very simple: TOUCH IT ONCE!
3. And yes, David Allen shows that stress is a direct result of letting things pile up, because our brains are built to think ABOUT things, rather than OF things. So the more we have on our minds, the less capable we are of thinking well.

It's a proven fact that having a trustworthy system for capturing and organizing our ideas allows our minds to rest at ease and think clearly.

Best Scenario

In an ideal world - and I can promise you that this is totally achievable - every e-Mail that you look at, the very first time, one at a time, you either delete, respond to quickly (under 2 minutes), or you put into a system where you organize your life. This system, according to Allen, can be as easy as a pad of paper, or as intricate as something like Evernote or Omnifocus.

The system is where you keep track of your projects, actions, items you are waiting on someone else to do, the maybe/someday things, and all that material that you cannot throw away because you might need to reference it someday, like that receipt for your pool table.

In this way, you soon EMPTY the inbox, possibly even close your e-Mail, and start actually working on what matters most.

*****

In my coaching, helping people achieve this one essential habit of emptying their inboxes has been mind blowing, and has brought them peace of mind and the ability to start spending quality time achieving their goals, instead of reacting to life.

Helpful Links:

• WikiSummary of Getting Things Done (link)
• The Ultimate Sales Machine (link)
• Getting Things Done (link)