The process of getting caught up with email and staying caught up with email involves learning a system for getting through all of your emails that have come in, making a decision about them, and then, getting back to work on your other work. So I'm going to show you in this section how to get current and stay current with email. But that doesn't mean simply doing all of your work right now so that you are totally and completely caught up forever. What it means is that when you get current, you are triaging everything that is in your inbox and you're making the initial decision what to do with it. And then you're able to repeat that process on a frequent enough basis that you are never allowing emails to pile up in your inbox.

So here is a starting point if you are feeling overwhelmed with email, if you are 10000 emails behind and you're not going to get caught up, here is where you start with what I called the inbox cleanout. This could be a critical step in your inbox overhaul. Let's say you've got 10000 emails in your inbox right now. You've kind of looked at all of them, but you realized that you are never going to go through every single one and figure out exactly what to do with it. What you can do is, you can create a new folder or new tag if you are using Gmail or another tag-based email system. Call it "inbox cleanout" and include the month and the year. And then simply move every single message that is currently in your inbox into that folder, or if you are using a tag-based system, add that tag to all of those emails and then archive them. And instantly, your inbox will be empty.

And you think, "Well, that might feel good for a second, but am I losing track of things that I need to take a look at?" I mean, that's a fair question. But let's be realistic here—if you had 10000 emails on your inbox, you are not going to get to all of them anyway, right? it would take months to get to all of those emails. So probably, it was lost cause to begin with. And it's better to start fresh. But we're also not deleting those emails. If you need to go back through them and check, maybe you'll wake up in the middle of the night and you'll think, "Oh, somebody emailed me. I know I need to get back to that one person." You can always go and search for that email and get back to that person. But the emails will be out of your inbox. And of course, if you never remember to follow up, the other person can still follow up. And if somehow you do make time to triage those old emails, you can always remove them from that cleanout folder or remove the tag from them. And then you'll know that what's left in that folder really is messages that you actually have not seen or triaged. But you want to get that inbox empty initially so that it can do the job that it was designed to do.

Your inbox was designed to hold new communications. And once you've cleared it out for that process, you can start to use it on a frequent basis to actually keep track of new communications that come in. Now for most people, if you are in a leadership role and email is a frequent tool that people use in your organization, you probably want to check email about 3 times a day. But you don't just want to check it and scroll through and look at it and get a sense of what's there, you want to specifically and carefully and rigorously process every email in your inbox. Now that may sound crazy. that may sound like something you could never do because you're not going to be able to get all of that work done in just a few minutes. But set a timer, give yourself maybe 20-25 minutes. Maybe less in the morning, maybe more in the afternoon—just depending on your schedule. But set time, give yourself a specific block of time where you can briefly go through all of your emails and get to zero in your inbox. Now how do you do that?

Well, there are a couple of different things that we'll need to do to make that possible. One is that there may be some tasks that need to go on your to-do list, or there may be some appointments that may need to go on your calendar so that you can block off the time you'll need to do those more time-consuming projects. But simply reading through your emails should not take that much time. But what we have to do is not just look at them, not just click on a few of them and cherry-pick, we have to actually go through every single one. And to understand how this can work, I think it's helpful to think of your email inbox just like a mailbox. Just like a postal mailbox. What would you do with your postal mailbox every day? You would go to your mailbox, you would check it, probably just once, cause the mail only comes once a day, if we're talking about postal mail. But you wouldn't leave anything in it, right? You would take everything out, you would quickly go through it and you'd throw out the junk. You would probably save the bulk of it, you might open some of it right away. You might open some of it later, but you would not look through it and then put it back in the mailbox.

Once you review it, you take everything out. Nothing goes back in the mailbox. And I think we've got to treat email in the same way. We've got to see the email inbox as the place from unprocessed messages, not a place to hold all of our unfinished work. And if you are overwhelmed by email right now, I'm going to guess that this is probably the single biggest factor that is causing that. That you are using your inox to hold all of your unfinished work and you are telling yourself, well as long as I have it in my inbox, I won't lose track of it. That may have been true at one point, but if you have 1000 or 5000 or 10000 emails in your inbox, you know it's not really working anymore. So I believe that no emails truly belong in your inbox long term. It is simply like a mailbox. Things come in, they get processed, and they get taken out of the inbox. If you allow them to pile up, you really are not going to be able to triage quickly to scan and prioritize and to see what communications have come in. So you want to get that email inbox completely empty probably multiple times per day. It's pretty simple to do that really. Once you get a fresh start and you get a process down here is all you have to do. Set a timer, 20 minutes is probably enough for the new emails for the day and for every email, simply make one of these four decisions about it. First of all, you can delete it. You could Delegate it. You could Defer it to later. Or you could simply Do it. And then, once you've done one of those things, you can archive the message and it's out of your inbox. So again, we're not doing the work that's represented in the email necessarily, unless it takes less than 2 minutes. We're not going to do that work now. We're simply going to triage it and make a decision. So let's talk about each of those four possibilities.

The first is of course to simply delete it. To say, you know what, this does not need to be in my inbox anymore. Maybe it is a nice FYI, but I'm going to get it out of my inbox because I am done with it. Now I call this delete because I think it's nice to have the alliteration of all of this starting with the letter D, but I don't want to encourage you to actually delete those emails. Just archive them. Because deleting really is a decision that you can agonize over for no reason. Storage space is cheap, it is almost free. My Gmail account has 100 gigabytes in it at the moment. And there's really no reason to think, oh should I delete this? Should I save it, should I archive it? Should I put it in a folder?  Don't even worry about deleting it—it's not worth it. I say delete because you are deleting it from your inbox. You are getting it out of your inbox and you may even choose to unsubscribe yourself from the mailing list. That can be a huge time saver in the long run if you get yourself off email lists that you don't really need to be on. Okay, so delete is our first option.

Our next is to delegate. You can of course forward it to someone else on your team, either without an explanation or with maybe a brief explanation. You could also possibly add a little note to the original sender and loop in the person who will be handling it. "Hey Pam, Steve can help you with this. Steve, could you look into this and get back to Pam?" Of course, really easy to delegate by forwarding, so that is our second option. Our third option is to defer the email.And for most leaders, this is the missing key. Most people don't have an effective way to defer or timeshift emails that they will be able to effectively answer later, but they can't effectively deal with right now.

So we'll have a whole section of the Inbox Overhaul on timeshifting. But briefly, when you are going through your inbox, all you have to do is make a decision about when you will make a decision about what to ultimately do with that email in the future. And then timeshift it and archive it. Now if there is a task you need to do, you may need to put that on your to-do list or schedule some time on your calendar when you can do that work, especially if other people are involved, you may need to work on it in a particular setting or in a particular day and time. But make that initial decision, timeshift the email, and then archive it and it's out of your way.

The fourth possibility is to do the email—to deal with whatever task is involved in the email right at that exact moment. And I like to have a 2-minute rule. If I can do this right now and it will take less than 2 minutes, I'm just going to get back to the person or do what they've asked me to do and not really put it off. Because it's going to take more time to put it on my to-do list and to follow up later or timeshift the email compared to just getting it done. And you may even adjust that rule at different times of the day. If you only have 5 minutes to check your email, you might give yourself a 30-second rule, and you're done with work for the day and now you're just catching up on things, you might even make that a 10-minute rule at night. Figure out how much time you want to allow yourself to get sidetracked with specific emails because the goal here is to get through everything. And if you can get something completely done, archive it, you never had to think about it again. it's this kind of touch it once and be done with it principle that's been around in time management productivity forever. We don't want to deal with things more times than we have to. So if you get it done in 2 minutes, get it done. Those, basically, are our options. Delete, delegate, defer, and do. Pick one of those. And then archive the message. Get it out of your inbox, don't really delete it. Don't move it to a specific folder, just get it out of your inbox and you are done with it.

So you can get current and you can stay current and email will no longer be the source of stress that it has been. Now I'm saying archive it, don't delete it, don't put it into a folder, because one of the things that we're trying to optimize here is we're trying to eliminate unnecessary decision making. Now, email can involve all kinds of high stakes decisions about policy and the work you're doing itself, but we don't want to add unnecessary small decisions, like hey, which folder should I put this in, does this go under budget or does this go under purchasing? There are all of these different options that we can consider and every "where should I file this?" decision that we make creates a future, "where did I file that" decision that we're going to have to try and reconstruct in the future when we are trying to find that email. But you know if you are going to find that email in the future, you probably are not going to go poking through a big system of folders. You are just going to do a search. And because search has gotten so good—especially in Gmail and Gsuite and of course in other apps as well, search is really good now. You don't really need to have a whole bunch of folders to organize your email. So simply archive them. Just make one archive folder, put any emails that you're done with into that folder and don't worry about it. Don't add all of these unnecessary layers of decisions, simply put the email in that archive folder, or hit that archive button and you are in good shape.

Now if you are onto using Gmail and there is no archive button, just make a folder and call it archive. Put all of your messages there. There may be a few things that you say to yourself, "well, I really need to have all of my emails about this one topic in a specific folder. Maybe you need to have your expenses all in a specific folder, okay. But don't give yourself 100 folders to choose from. Really be sparing with those folders and then put everything else in that archive folder. Sometimes you will get emails that are intentionally vague, you know, somebody will be trying to not create a paper trail. If you need to be able to find that email later, you can always forward it to yourself and add additional context. If somebody gives you a piece of information, but they are vague in writing about what it was about, you can forward it to yourself and say, "oh this is so and so's statement about the..."You can fill in the specific details there so that it is searchable later. But that is it for getting your inbox emptied. Delete, delegate, defer, and do. Those are the options, make the decision and get through every email in your inbox.