Managing Emails and Letting Go of Inbox Zero

As a teacher, one of my favorite things to do is to figure out a word picture or to take something that is so close to you that you're literally living through it and make it so obvious that you can't unsee it going forward. A couple of months ago, I came up with the title for this podcast and I thought "Yes!" and I've been thinking about how email is the laundry and dishes of work. In this week's episode, I'll explain!

Doing laundry and dishes is administrative, it's repetitive, it's hard to outsource. Yet it is essential for your well-being and your cleanliness; and so that you won't be naked when you leave the house! Laundry and dishes are NEVER DONE. 

I'm a middle-of-the-road person. I'm not going to leave everything in my inbox, but I'm not going to use one single folder either. If it's in a folder, it doesn't exist to me. That's why file cabinets don't work for me. I had a beautiful color-coded file cabinet. It was pointless. That's my limitation - if it's out of sight, it's literally out of mind. For me, it doesn't exist. Everything in my email that's in process must be visual.

STEP ONE: You should only have companies and emails coming into your email inbox that you want to do business with. So that means UNSUBSCRIBE!

STEP TWO: Once you have emails coming into your inbox, you need to learn to triage and respond in the appropriate time.

I'll never get to inbox zero. I'm fine with it. Also, there's no need to respond to email within 24 hours. Scary, I know. Unless your company has a policy, you're not breaking any laws, I promise. My personal response rate? 7 days. Terrible, horrible I know...I can't believe I said that out loud! 

We need to give ourselves grace and understand that laundry, dishes, and email are never going to be done. We need to pace ourselves, and when you stop trying to get email, laundry, and dishes done - you free up so much mental capacity and time for things that are bigger that you're uniquely created to do. 

I'll leave you with a couple questions. What if you didn't reply to emails within 24 hours? What if you didn't reply to emails on Sundays? What if you didn't reply to emails from Friday at 5pm until Sunday at 5pm? 

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