Is Bringing Your Inbox to Zero Like Cleaning Dirty Dishes?

Email management is not an easy job; it takes a lot of talent and patience to manage your inbox and replying to mails requiring immediate attention, segregating those mails that need to be archived and sending mails to the junk. Thinking that the inbox is just like the mail box in front of your home will help in deleting away those unwanted messages. Don’t consider the inbox as your workstation. It’s just a temporary place where you store messages for a very short period of time and unless you clear it out regularly, you will have to face a monstrous amount of mails in your account. It all however depends upon the type of work you do. If you have to deal with people from all over the globe and contact them regularly during your working hours, then probably you will have to keep the inbox open the whole time. You will be notified whenever a mail comes in and you can deal with it accordingly. But this is applicable to only those people whose work is centered on contacting people and checking for responses. Other wise, you can decide certain times during the day during which you are going to check your mail and go ahead and do it. Checking mails, replying to it, forwarding, trashing and archiving consumes a lot of time, the time that you should be putting into productive work, so allotting time checks to it will prove useful.

Actually, making your inbox zero is a much more easier job than cleaning those dirty dishes in the kitchen. Get organized about the mails you are receiving, because consolidating them this will prevent procrastination. This will in turn lead to productivity in the long run. You need to have a clean and calm mind to get your work done efficiently. Similarly, you must also clean out the online mailbox before starting off the day’s work, because those unread messages are just going to get in your way. You can defer from sending in a reply as soon as the mail comes in, but what will you do if the mail is sent by somebody really important and that person expects a quick reply. If you have a Blackberry of iPhone you can get several things done, things that you need reminding for. You can assign tasks in them and set a reminder, so you don’t have to forget what to do, especially if its an important mail that you have to send. This way you can actually deal with technology to effectively handle another technology.

You can also create a category in your inbox that says “response needed” or something to that effect and save those messages there. Once you archive these messages that way, then you will have to remember checking them and sending in the required replies.