How often do you lose track of important emails or realize you missed a deadline from several days ago because it got lost in the shuffle? When you’re visually overwhelmed by your inbox and too busy to manage it effectively, your productivity and diligence fall. It's okay to feel a bit overwhelmed by your inbox: honestly, leaving a pending list of things you need to do is not an effective way to stay organized, nor should it be. Reevaluate your strategy for managing emails and begin to think about your inbox in a new (more manageable) way. You should never let emails sit in your inbox for over 24h, and chances are, if they weren’t important a day ago, they probably aren’t important now.
Do you have emails that have been sitting in your inbox for weeks? Untouched and unread? In tribute to your new-found sanity, delete them. The first step is to start thinking about email differently and forget the nightmare of an inbox that got you reading this article in the first place. If you can tackle your email efficiently, you’ll be more productive at work and reading through your inbox won’t be a daily struggle. There’s no elusive secret to managing your inbox, but there are significant steps you can take to diminish the mountain of emails you’ve accumulated.
So what's the secret to managing your email and, with it, your sanity? Everyone wants to know how to achieve that perfect state of email enlightenment and inbox zero. Before you know it, you’re drowning in spam emails, calendar invites, and anything important has sunk to the bottom. A full inbox is a stress point for everyone, as the mountain of unread emails becomes infinitely larger. Are you staring down hundreds of emails a day and not sure where to begin? Achieving inbox zero can be a very daunting task, and if you’re looking at a cluttered inbox, you might even say it’s impossible.