You will be able to clear an inbox quickly by making one decision for each email.
Close your email app now and check that its notifications are still batched the way you set them up in Lesson 5.1. Keep it closed until the next time you plan to look at it. Email is easiest to handle when you go to it at a moment you picked, and much harder when every new message pulls you back in.
Someone opens their inbox to look up one thing. They read a message and mark it unread again, meaning to answer it later. They begin a reply to another one, a third catches their eye, and they shut the window. An hour later they are back looking at the same messages, all read and none decided. By Friday the inbox holds 600 emails. They can't tell which ones still need anything, and searching is the only way they can find what they want.
The cause here was the handling, and the number of emails had little to do with it. Each message was opened several times and none of them got a decision. The fix is to deal with every email once: open it, decide, and move on.
Pick the times you will look at email, and don't leave it open all day answering each new arrival. Three or four checks a day works for most roles, for example at 9am, before lunch, mid-afternoon and before you leave (an example schedule). It's the same idea as the message blocks in Lesson 3.3, Give important tasks a time on the calendar. Outside those times the app stays shut and notifications stay batched.
Each check is a session where you process your email, which means working through the new messages until each one has a decision. If you work with customers or are on call, you may need more checks than this, and that's acceptable. The pattern stays the same: look at a time you chose, process everything that's there, and close the app again.
Take the new emails one at a time. Before you open the next one, give the current one of these four decisions:
Delete or archive it when nothing needs doing: newsletters you've read, FYIs, confirmations, threads that are finished. If you might want to find it by search later, archive it. Reply now when the answer will take under two minutes. This is David Allen's two-minute rule from Lesson 2.3, used on email. Make it a task when it needs more than two minutes of work. Write the next action into your task system, link back to the email if your tools let you, and archive the message. Defer it to a date when it needs a longer reply or a decision you aren't ready to make. Book a calendar block or add a task with a date on it, then archive the email or file it in one folder you keep only for deferred mail.
The habit to avoid is opening an email, telling yourself you'll come back to it, and leaving it where it is. Doing that over and over is how an inbox turns into a pile, so no email you've read should stay there without a decision.
Priya ran one morning batch this way. She had 27 new emails. She archived 14, answered 6 that took under two minutes each, made 5 into tasks and put 2 into a block on Thursday. That covers all of them: 14 + 6 + 5 + 2 = 27. The session took 25 minutes, and her inbox was empty when she closed it.
Requests arrive by email, so a lot of people treat the inbox as their to-do list. It's a poor one for several reasons. Messages sit in order of arrival, so the request that matters most can be buried under twenty that hardly matter. Anyone can add to it whenever they like. Real tasks are mixed in with newsletters and notifications. And each item is worded by the sender, often vaguely, so you don't see a clear next action.
Treat the inbox as a holding place for things you haven't processed yet. Once you've decided what a message means, move it out: into the archive, into your task system as a next action, or into a dated slot. David Allen says the same about every kind of inbox in his book Getting Things Done. Taking email out once it's decided also means the task system you built in Module 2 stays the only place you check for what to do next.
You don't have to work through a large backlog message by message before you begin. If you have thousands of old emails, select everything older than a month and archive it all at once. Anyone whose message mattered will follow up, and you can still search the archive.
Some mail can be kept out of the inbox entirely. Start with newsletters: unsubscribe from any you haven't opened in a month. The link is usually at the bottom of the email, and each one takes about ten seconds. Shopping, travel and app newsletters are usually the biggest sources.
For automated mail you still need, such as receipts, reports and system notifications, set up automatic sorting that sends it straight to a folder without passing through the inbox. Gmail calls these filters and Outlook calls them rules. Look through that folder once a day or once a week, so those messages don't break into your processing sessions.
If you're on cc for mail you don't use, ask to be removed. A message such as "I'm happy to be taken off the cc for the daily ops summary, if that's useful to you too" is a reasonable request in most teams.
Marcus made two filters, one for automatic alerts from the delivery system and one for supplier invoices. He also unsubscribed from eleven newsletters. His incoming mail dropped enough that each processing session took about half as long.
For your activity, apply this to your own inbox and take it all the way to empty, giving each message one decision. If you have a backlog, archive everything older than a month first. Then go through each remaining email, decide on it, and carry on until the inbox is clear. Close the app until your next set time.
Clear your inbox to empty once, making one decision per email, and count how many emails became tasks.
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