If you have an inbox in your office space for receiving incoming letters, faxes, memos and miscellaneous deliveries, then the chances are that you go through what’s in it on a regular basis and do something with its contents. You may elect to throw some stuff in the bin, file some things, put a few pieces of paper on your desk or leave some to the side as you’re not really sure what to do next! Whatever you choose to do, it’s unlikely that you will leave your inbox over-flowing with stuff, primarily because you want to be able to receive new items whenever they arrive.

In the e-mail world, however, most of us treat our inbox as the great catch-all: a mix of new unopened mails, old rubbish, unanswered questions, out-of-date alerts, mails that we probably need to do something about but aren’t quite sure what to do next etc. The primary reason why we don’t empty our inbox in the same way as we would our office in-tray is that we have almost infinite capacity; there are no obvious consequnces if we don’t do so. In some organisational environments, there are restrictions on how much mail can be stored but with the ever-reducing cost of storage, these are fading away. For example, Google now offers several GBs for their Gmail users.

Even if our inbox capacity is infinite, by not regularly processing our inbox (and I would recommend emptying it on a daily basis) we are clouding our view of what we have to deal with and consequently, increasing our resistance to action (this is bad, bad, bad!).

The art of processing will be covered in detail in another post but essentially involves taking a decision on what we need to do with each mail. Luckily, there are actually a limited number of options: delete (highly recommended), take an action ourselves, delegate or forward to somebody else, file in an appropriate location or defer to a later time for reminder/action. That’s it! You see, it’s not quite as complicated as you might have feared.

Resolve today to rediscover the true meaning of inbox! Here’s my attempt at a re-framed definition: a place where your incoming mail accumulates until you make a decision & take an action on what needs to be done with each item. Having an e-mail inbox is really useful. It allows us to be busy doing real work while all the time collecting our inputs without requiring our attention. But as soon as we forget it’s true purpose, we begin to lose its value.