4 STEPS TO AN EMPTY INBOX AND A GOOD FEELING IN THE EVENING

I wonder how many of those messages are unread? How long is my response time? How many times do I forget something and not respond in time? If you are asking yourself similar questions, this article is for you.

I struggled with emails for a long time. They come at us from all sides, and then who is supposed to keep up, to answer them. Today, with few exceptions, I dealt with them. Exceptions are only occasionally, when I have some “tour” in Czech countries or holidays. But I have a system to handle that, too.

It is the applied GTD method supplemented with an additional step. I’ll introduce her in a moment. But first, a few things why to have an empty inbox.

– unfinished business takes attention

– what gets our attention affects our well-being

– an overflowing inbox leads to mistakes… (an undeniable fact)and finally, who can say in good conscience that they won’t forget anything with an overflowing inbox?

IT’S EASY

Here are the principles I’m basing it on :

What you can do now, do now.

What a crock of shit.

Delegate what doesn’t belong to you.

What you can’t do now, plan.

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW, DO IT.

It’s not that hard. Any email that I can answer right away, I will also check in right away. I’ll just take it and answer it. And I’ll delete it right now. No compromise. Inbox is not an archive. This is very important to understand. Many people have an archive of their inbox that they don’t know anyway. I’ve met so many people, friends, clients, who tell me it’s fine and they have no problem with emails. And so often they are unable to answer me. So often they are unable to deliver what I need from them. Just because my email got overlooked in the flood.

Of course, I have an ARCHIVE folder where I store important emails that I might return to at some point.

WHAT’S BULLSHIT, THROW IT AWAY.

A simple thing. Well, it’s not that simple. If I get all sorts of “fun” things in my work email, it might be hard not to pay attention to them. I have a policy, I’m deleting it now! Now, now, now, now. I mean, I have proven contacts that I get a funny email from once a year. Especially something about Samsung ( I’m an Apple sheep) 🙂 And I might look at that one. Very rarely.

DELEGATE WHAT’S NOT YOURS

It often happens that I receive an email that I should seemingly address. If it’s not in my purview, I return it immediately to the sender (that is if the email is from a colleague in the company ). Of course, as the head of the company, I often get emails that I can’t handle. I’ll simply pass them on to a colleague for processing. It may not be that simple if I don’t have a usable tool. At the end of this reflection I will present how easy it can be.

WHAT YOU CAN’T DO NOW, PLAN.

Any email that I can’t handle right away, I schedule when I’ll reply to it. I set a specific deadline and I try to meet it. These are mostly emails from clients that I need to get information on.

IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?

IT IS!

It’s also true that if you don’t have the tools, it can really be a problem to deal with.

Now do the same thing again with a tool to solve it. With the help of 1CLICK :

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW, DO IT.

There is nothing to solve here. No tool is needed. Just do it. In 1CLICK we have an integrated email client. We wanted to keep it simple. So that we are not unnecessarily disturbed when processing email. In most email processing programs, there are a lot of intrusive features that the average user will never use. They’re just taking attention.

WHAT’S BULLSHIT, THROW IT AWAY.

See above. What do you expect? Small, small, small 🙂

DELEGATE WHAT’S NOT YOURS

Many people can’t delegate. A lot of it has to do with the bosses. We’d better do it ourselves. Then we do the work for others and we can’t keep up ourselves. Every now and then I meet someone who is exhausted from the amount of work they can’t keep up with. When we take a closer look together at all the things that person does, we always wonder how much he does for others. The most common solution is to forward the mail.

Whether you’re the boss or the project manager or just the person responsible for something, you want to make sure it gets done. What kind of control do you have when you forward the mail? None. With 1CLICK, you simply create a task from an email and have clear control over whether it’s being addressed. Beware, this is not a normal tasking tool. All the important pitfalls of why most “taskmasters” don’t work are solved here. For example, a clear overview of to whom, with what deadline and in what state the tasks I have assigned are.