{"id":3039,"date":"2014-10-16T09:08:42","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T16:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/?p=3039"},"modified":"2014-10-16T09:08:42","modified_gmt":"2014-10-16T16:08:42","slug":"the-relief-of-an-empty-inbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/the-relief-of-an-empty-inbox\/","title":{"rendered":"The Relief of an Empty Inbox"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oct. 16, 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many of you may have a goal to keep your inbox nearly empty, but have not succeeded at doing that. The main reason I like to keep my inbox empty is that it feels good<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Once my inbox gets larger than say 40 messages, I feel like I am losing track of what\u2019s hanging out there undone or unattended to. Each time I empty my inbox, I feel a wave of relief that I am ahead of the game. If I am sitting at my desktop computer all day, I\u2019ll often empty my inbox several times a day. It only takes minutes and it\u2019s nice to feel ahead of things all day long.<\/p>\n

The other reason to not leave mail in the inbox is you can\u2019t tell which of your e-mails you are done with, and which e-mail needs more attention\u2014it becomes one big mess. Then, you spend hours per week rehashing your mail, constantly re-reading things in the hope to find those things that you think you still need to take action on. That wastes a lot of time.<\/p>\n

Easy Methods<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are easy ways to keep your inbox nearly empty. The key to all of them is to have a good task management system into which you can copy action requests that arrive by email so that you don\u2019t need to stockpile email in the inbox for future action. The inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks; the MYN or 1MTD task system<\/a> is a great place to manage tasks, so move your incoming e-mail action requests into your task system as soon as you can.<\/p>\n

Single-folder filing is another way to make emptying the inbox simple. All my books talk about how to do that. For example, see Lesson 5 in my Outlook book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quick Way to Empty a Long-Overloaded Inbox<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re already a user of the MYN or 1MTD task system, but haven\u2019t had time to sit down and dig out of a huge historical inbox, I have a very quick way to help you get there. It\u2019s written up at this link<\/a>, I recommend you give it a try.<\/p>\n

Michael<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oct. 16, 2014 Many of you may have a goal to keep your inbox nearly empty, but have not succeeded at doing that. The main reason I like to keep my inbox empty is that it feels good. Once my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3041,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3039\/revisions\/3041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}