How I Process My Email (2019 Edition)

How I Process My Email (2019 Edition)

How many emails are in your inbox? How much time do you spend scanning over emails that are already seen, thinking about what you have to do to each one? Inbox zero, which is not the number of emails in your inbox, minimizes the time you spend in your inbox. Today I share my current (as of 2019) method of processing email.

I had a shock the other day. I was at a co-worker's computer to help her with some code, and saw that she had 32,000+ emails in her inbox. Unread. I understand that we get a lot of email every day, mostly status messages from the system. But this floored me. How many are in my inbox? Zero. Now I understood why she could never find anything that wasn't from the current day, and was always saying, "I didn't see that email."

It's really not that hard to stay on top of your email.
Getting A Fresh Start On Email

Getting A Fresh Start On Email

If you are like most people, you have a lot of emails in your inbox, either unread or waiting for action. In fact, one study found that the average worker had 199 unread emails in their inbox. Another study found that workers receive 121 emails per day.

That is a lot of email to be confronted with every time you open your inbox.

The problem with this is that if you don’t empty out and process the emails (also known as “keeping up with it”), you will have to scan all those emails every time you open the program. And the longer the list, the longer the scan, and that means a whole lot of wasted time.

But what can you do about it? You can clear out and get a fresh start.