Email Overload
It surprises me every day how much trouble people seem to have dealing with email. David Allen (the GTD expert) has his own opinion about it in his latest Food For Thought column:
“…information overload isn’t the problem. If it was, you’d walk into a library and die. The first time you connected to the Web, you’d blow up, and merely browsing a newspaper would make you a nervous wreck.”
I receive just over 100 emails per day, but it takes me very little time to process and respond to them. The first level of processing is the inbox itself. I have 3 different ones - Business, Personal and Bulk. The Bulk inbox is where all of my low priority newsletters, account information, and status updates go to, and only needs to be checked once a day. This cuts out about 30 messages, half of which are spam.
My Business and Personal accounts are both hosted on Gmail. This gives me access anywhere, as well as excellent SPAM filtering that reduces my email to process by another 40 messages. That only leaves 30 messages a day I even have to look at.
At this level, I ask myself similar questions to the ones David spells out in his column:
“Is it actionable? If not, is it trash, is it to be stored for later action, or is it reference? If it is actionable, what’s the next action? And what outcome, if any, should I now be committed to?”
Of the 30 emails left for me to process manually, only about half of them actually require a response. The rest go to the Archive folder in Gmail and leave my inbox empty and waiting for the next message to process.
