Handling Your Inbox

How do you handle your inbox? Whatever you do, the chances are you get more email than you really need and that it often distracts you from the things you should really be doing. How well you manage your inbox can have a big impact on the way you do your job; here are some tips.

1. Notifications - Outlook, by default, pops a message to your screen every time you receive an email. This is very useful until you receive more than a few emails a day, at which point it becomes a huge distraction. Turn off pop-up notifications and use rules to alert you to important messages, like those sent with high priority, from key customers or from your boss. 
2. Use folders - once you have setup your rules, use them to move your important email to a separate folder so that you can check those messages without being distracted by other, less urgent, communications.
3. Don't check your email - it is tempting to check for new email every few minutes, particularly if you're working through a long, boring task. Try not to do this and stick instead with your chosen task.
4. Work from a task list - don't use your inbox as a surrogate task list. Instead, list and prioritise your tasks in a separate application (Word, Evernote, Excel, Trello or whatever best suits your workflow) so that you don't need to hit your inbox, and risk distraction, to find your next task.
5. Distribution lists - choose your distribution lists with care; do you really need to see every email sent to every team? Be brutal; remove yourself from any list that isn't absolutely key to your normal daily task and trust your colleagues to forward to you anything for which they need your input. 
6. Hide your client - is your email client always visible on the screen? Minimise it or hide it behind your active windows to reduce its ability to interrupt you. If you're working on a difficult or time-sensitive task, close your client.
7. Trust your colleagues - if you are on the cc list of a non-urgent email, skim read it then let your colleagues deal with it. If they really need your input they'll ask (the flip side is that you may need to nudge colleagues who are similarly trusting you to contact them with anything urgent or important).
8. Finally, tackle your regular, unimportant email only between major tasks in 15-30 minute blocks. Aim to reduce your inbox to zero unread messages during that session by working through all your messages, responding to any that can be quickly handled, adding new tasks to your task list when quick answers aren't possible and coldly ignoring anything that doesn't actually require your attention. Once you're done, minimise your client and pick up the next task from your list.

These tips won't magically shrink your workload but they should help you to manage it more efficiently and that can be a big win in a competitive or high-pressure workplace.