
Boston in 1826. Compare this map to Boston today to appreciate how much of the city's land is actually claimed from the sea and estuaries. (A large, zoomable version of the 1826 map is available at the Web site of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. A large version of modern Boston is available at the National Park Service Web site.)
Claiming land to make more space for a city is analogous to clearing your inbox to make more space for new mail. Once the clutter is removed and your day-to-day operations are more regular, you'll be more effective. Messages will be easier to find, things won't get lost in your inbox, and you'll feel better about the whole thing. Like creating new land for a city, clearing your inbox creates value from empty space.
If your email inbox is bloated, you probably want to clean it up. If you cleared it out recently, and it's gradually re-bloating, you probably fear it's happening again. Maybe you've just given up altogether.
Unless you have an assistant, or you're one of the carefully energetic few who regularly keep their inboxes clear, bloat and bloat anxiety are facts of life. Advice about how to keep your inbox clear once it's clear does help, but it doesn't help you get your inbox clear — it doesn't help you recover from bloat. Here are some suggestions for bloat recovery.
- Recognize that inbox bloat is a fact of your life
- Some believe that once they clear their inboxes, they'll magically stay clear. Sadly, that doesn't work. Unless you change how you operate, re-bloat is inevitable, and cleaning up is hardly worth it.
- Keep doing what you're doing
- Whatever you've been doing, keep it up for now. Beating yourself up for not dealing with every single one of today's messages is demoralizing. Instead, focus on the total message count — drive it down a little every day.
- Use sort-by-subject and sort-by-sender
- When you work on the backlog, sort your inbox by sender or subject, instead of by date. That way, related messages often appear next to each other, and you can select and deal with several at once.
- Read your new email less frequently
- Do what you can to read new email less often. Allocate some of the time you save to sorting, classifying, and deleting old mail.
- Move aged messages elsewhere
- Move all messages more than three years old to a folder elsewhere. Think about it — three years is enough time to create a toddler who sasses you back. Messages that old are unlikely to be of value, but if you want them, move them elsewhere.
- Beating yourself up for
not dealing with every
single one of today's
messages is demoralizing.
Let it go. - Filter out the junk
- Even if you're protected from junk, occasionally junk does get through. Search for the usual keywords and delete the junk. Also look for old out-of-the-office messages.
- Eat elephants in small bites
- It probably took a long time to build all the bloat in your inbox. Give yourself time to get rid of it. A goal of reducing it by 25 to 50 messages per day is reasonable, but go easy at first. Set the goal low enough to give you some experience of achievement, and before you know it, your inbox will be nearly clear.
Managing your inbox to prevent bloat requires adding some regular practices to your routine. Until you dramatically reduce the current bloat, these practices will have little effect. But you can get started learning about them, and start using each new practice as soon as you understand it. More about these in a future article. Top
Next Issue
Are you so buried in email that you don't even have time to delete your spam? Do you miss important messages? So many of the problems we have with email are actually within our power to solve, if we just realize the consequences of our own actions. Read 101 Tips for Writing and Managing Email to learn how to make peace with your inbox. Order Now!
And if you have organizational responsibility, you can help transform the culture to make more effective use of email. You can reduce volume while you make content more valuable. You can discourage email flame wars and that blizzard of useless if well-intended messages from colleagues and subordinates. Read Where There's Smoke There's Email to learn how to make email more productive at the organizational scale — and less dangerous. Order Now!
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Communication at Work:
Mastering Q and A
- The question-and-answer exchanges that occur during or after presentations rarely add much to the overall
effort. But how you deal with questions can be a decisive factor in how your audience evaluates you
and your message.
Nasty Questions: II
- In meetings, telemeetings, and email we sometimes ask questions that aren't intended to elicit information.
Rather, they're indirect attacks intended to advance the questioner's political agenda. Here's part
two of a catalog of some favorite tactics.
The True Costs of Indirectness
- Indirect communications are veiled, ambiguous, excessively diplomatic, or conveyed to people other than
the actual target. We often use indirectness to avoid confrontation or to avoid dealing with conflict.
It can be an expensive practice.
Bemused Detachment
- Much of the difficulty between people at work is avoidable if only we can find ways to slow down our
responses to each other. When we hurry, we react without thinking. Here's a suggestion for increasing
comity by slowing down.
How to Answer When You Don't Know How to Answer
- People engaged in knowledge work must often respond to questions that test the limits of their knowledge,
or the limits of everyone's knowledge. Responding effectively to such questions advances us all.
See also Effective Communication at Work and Effective Communication at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming June 4: White-Collar Contractor Sabotage
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And on June 11: More Things I've Learned Along the Way: VI
- When I gain an important insight, or when I learn a lesson, I make a note. Example: If you're interested in changing how a social construct operates, knowing how it came to be the way it is can be much less useful than knowing what keeps it the way it is. Available here and by RSS on June 11.
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