Does your email inbox stress you out? Some of us have so many emails to deal with, it can be overwhelming and the thought of being an inbox-zero person feels impossible. But Laura Mae Martin, Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor, has a method for dealing with email and it’s all about treating your inbox like your laundry.
Martin says the reason emails are the source of so much stress for some folks is that they approach their inbox by picking and choosing. The same way some people will take one shirt out of the dryer, leave the rest of the laundry in there, and then decide to start the dryer again and put off dealing with the rest of the clothes until tomorrow. Instead, she recommends dealing with everything in the dryer at once. When it’s time to empty the dryer, get everything out, fold it all and put it away and the same goes for emails.
The way Martin handles her inbox is to sort all incoming emails into three “piles”:
- One pile is “to-do,” the things she needs to take action on, without input from anyone else.
- The second pile is “waiting,” which are things she has to do, but needs someone else’s input or response before she can do them.
- The third pile is for emails she has to “read.”
Using this system, Martin gets to inbox zero by sorting all her incoming emails in chronological order. She handles all her “to-dos” first, one by one. In the afternoon, when her energy is lower, she goes through her “read” pile of emails and at the end of the day, she checks in on the “waiting” pile to see what can be done and what’s holding up progress. Martin says her only two rules for email are, “Treat it like laundry and close it once or twice a day.”
Source: Women's Health
Photo: Getty Images