Good advice, but I would go further. Don’t use your inbox as a to-do list at all. I maintain a separate to-do list for roughly three reasons.
(1) You can’t have your inbox in chronological and priority order. Keeping an inbox and email folders in chronological order is good for searching and keeping track of email conversations.
(2) Possibly just my own psychological quirk, but inbox emails feel like someone waiting for me and getting impatient. I can’t seem to get away from my inbox fundamentally representing a communications channel with people on the other end. Watching me.
(3) When I “do email”, I know I’m done when I have literally inbox zero, and I get the satisfaction of that several times a day.
I have found that I need scrupulous email and task accounting though. Every email gets deleted (and that advice on unsubscribing is good), or handled right away (within say 2 minutes), or gets a task on a to-do list and the email goes into a subject folder for when it comes to be dealt with.
Good advice, but I would go further. Don’t use your inbox as a to-do list at all. I maintain a separate to-do list for roughly three reasons.
(1) You can’t have your inbox in chronological and priority order. Keeping an inbox and email folders in chronological order is good for searching and keeping track of email conversations.
(2) Possibly just my own psychological quirk, but inbox emails feel like someone waiting for me and getting impatient. I can’t seem to get away from my inbox fundamentally representing a communications channel with people on the other end. Watching me.
(3) When I “do email”, I know I’m done when I have literally inbox zero, and I get the satisfaction of that several times a day.
I have found that I need scrupulous email and task accounting though. Every email gets deleted (and that advice on unsubscribing is good), or handled right away (within say 2 minutes), or gets a task on a to-do list and the email goes into a subject folder for when it comes to be dealt with.