You will be able to process an inbox quickly by making one decision per email.
You open your inbox to check one thing. You read an email, decide to reply later, and leave it marked unread. You read another, start a reply, get distracted by a third, and close the window. An hour later you're back, and the same emails are waiting, read but undecided. By Friday the inbox has 600 emails in it, you aren't sure which ones still matter, and searching it is the only way to find anything.
The problem isn't the number of emails. It's that each one gets looked at several times without a decision. This lesson gives you a way to look at each email once.
Email works best when you go to it, not when it comes to you. Instead of keeping your inbox open all day and reacting to each arrival, check at set times. Three or four times a day suits most roles, for example at 9am, before lunch, mid-afternoon and before you leave.
That is the same principle as the message blocks from lesson 3.3, Give important tasks a time on the calendar. Between checks, the email app is closed and its notifications are batched, as you set up in lesson 5.1. When you do open it, you process, which means getting through the new messages to a decision on each.
If your role is customer-facing or on call, you may need to check more often, and that's fine. The principle still holds: check at a time you chose, process what's there, then close it.
When you open an email, make a decision before you move on. There are four choices.
Delete or archive it if no action is needed. Newsletters you've read, FYIs, confirmations, threads that are finished. Archive if you might search for it later. Reply now if the reply takes under two minutes. This is David Allen's two-minute rule from lesson 2.3, applied to email. Turn it into a task if it needs more than two minutes of work. Add a next action to your task system, with a link to the email if your tools allow it, then archive the email. Defer it to a dated slot if it needs a longer reply or a decision you can't make yet. Put a block on your calendar or a task with a date, then archive the email or move it to a single folder for that purpose.
What you don't do is read it, think "I'll deal with that later", and leave it in the inbox. That one habit is what turns an inbox into a pile.
Priya processed one morning batch this way. Of 27 new emails, she archived 14, replied to 6 in under two minutes each, turned 5 into tasks and deferred 2 to a block on Thursday. It took 25 minutes, and when she closed the inbox it was empty. Those figures are hers on one morning, as an example.
Many people use their inbox as their task list. It seems natural, since the email is where the request came from. But an inbox makes a poor task list. It is sorted by arrival time, and the most important request can sit below twenty that barely matter. Other people can add to it at any time. Tasks sit next to newsletters and notifications. And the item is described in someone else's words, often vague, rather than as a clear next action.
An inbox is a place for unprocessed items. Once you have decided what an email means, it should leave the inbox: into the archive, into your task system as a next action, or into a dated slot. Allen makes the same point about all inboxes in Getting Things Done. That is how your task system from module 2 stays the one place to look.
You don't have to clear years of old emails to start. If you have thousands, archive everything older than a month in one go. If anything in it mattered, the sender will follow up, and you can always search the archive.
Some email shouldn't reach your inbox at all.
Unsubscribe from any newsletter you haven't opened in a month. Each one takes ten seconds, and the link is usually at the bottom of the email. Shopping, travel and app newsletters are the main culprits.
For automated mail you do need, such as system notifications, receipts or reports, set up a filter or rule that skips the inbox and files it in a folder. Outlook calls these rules and Gmail calls them filters. You can then look at that folder once a day or once a week, instead of having each one interrupt a processing session.
If you are copied on a lot of email you don't need, ask. "I'm happy to be taken off the cc for the daily ops summary, if that's useful to you too" is a reasonable message in most teams.
Marcus set up two filters, one for the delivery system's automatic alerts and one for supplier invoices, and unsubscribed from eleven newsletters. His inbox volume dropped enough that a processing session took about half as long.
Your activity is to put this into practice on your own inbox, all the way to empty, using one decision per message.
Process your inbox to empty once using the one-decision rule and note how many emails became tasks.
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