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As I sit down to write this commentary – there are 33 emails in my Inbox.  Inbox Zero is the concept of having no emails in your inbox – having disposed of them all in one way or another.

Three or four years ago Jason mentioned to me how easy it was to unsubscribe from mailing lists.  This came during a conversation where I lamented that I just couldn’t get my email under control having spent more than a decade with 7,000+ emails in my inbox.  The problem it seems is that when things come into my inbox, I will look at them quickly and then if it’s something I want to read later or file in a client folder I will promise myself to get back to it when I can.  Add into this questionable approach the fact that I was also using my inbox as my task list, and you can easily understand how the disaster occurred.

Over the past few years, anticipating that one day I would retire and be handing off this mess to someone else, I have made a concerted effort to solve this problem once and for all.  My first strategy was to allocate time every week and start with the oldest messages, reading, filing and deleting as appropriate.  This got me down from 7k to 5k, which was huge progress, but every week as I disposed of a few hundred emails another hundred would add onto the chain.  I then upgraded to Strategy #2, taking Jason’s advice and unsubscribing to industry reading that was a little outside of what I really needed to see to do my job.  That step is also helping.

Strategy #3 has been the most fruitful.  Strategy #3A – When I see client related emails where I am not expected to respond, I just delete them – no more filing them in case I want to refer to later.  I know the original author or recipient at ASI has their copy and they are the ones driving the conversation.  I have come to accept and frankly appreciate that I no longer must know everything about all our clients.  Strategy #3B – Let go the ‘fear of missing out’ on industry reading.  No offence to my friends at Benefits Canada and Pension and Benefits Monitor, but sometimes there just isn’t time to read the daily email.  In days past they would just accumulate in my inbox hoping for that day where free time would let me go back and read two or three at once.  This did happen sometimes, but dozens would accumulate and be well out of date by the time I came around to delete them.  So, the new habit is to try each week to close off by deleting the things I didn’t have time to read – knowing that a whole new batch of reading will arrive next week and I will never run out.

The remaining problem that I have yet to figure out, is the ‘inbox-task list’ challenge.  When I am in an ongoing conversation, I tend to keep the most recent email as a reminder that at some point I need to follow-up.  For the almost twenty years that I have known Jason, he keeps a handwritten to-do list on his desk and updates it frequently.  So old school and so effective (for him).  I just can’t seem to make the leap.  Trust me, I have tried – both paper and electronically.  Occasionally, I will find a to-do list on my desk buried under paper and realize most items are done and the ones I didn’t do because I totally forgot were not that important because no one noticed.  Before you rush to recommend an electronic list, I have one of those too – but often I get completely absorbed in the three things I am working on and with limited ‘multi-tasking’ ability everything else falls out of view.  There is a great scene in the Simpsons where Chief Wiggum says of his son Ralph that ‘he doesn’t know where the sun goes when the drapes are closed’.  That is me!

If you google ‘email overload’ there is no shortage of advice on how to solve the problem which tells me that I am not the only one who suffers.  One piece of advice often given is to only look at email at designated times.  I think this is good advice if you can’t find the time to focus on your ‘real work’, but I don’t think it helps reduce the overload.  It just compartmentalizes when we suffer.  When I first started ASI in 1998, I worked alone from home.  At the time I had no BlackBerry and had few clients to go see.  I had email open all day and if an email came up, like Pavlov’s dog, I responded immediately.  Back in the good old days – my inbox was close to empty except for the two or three that made up my task list in what I think back on as my ‘starving artist’ days.  Today, if you turn off email for a half-day, you come back to 20 to 30 new emails.  My friend Kevin used to get about 300 a day – he needed an assistant for triage.  He is retired now and doesn’t miss that mess one bit.  As I near the end of this commentary, my inbox is only up to 34 – but its only 8am – wait a few hours and the treadmill will warm up.

Post-script

As part of this journey, I setup a personal email where I direct interesting reading that I don’t want to clog up my inbox.  I just checked; I have 5,279 emails in that inbox.  Hmmmm.