Article By Kevin L. DeWitt

 

Are the in-boxes in your life stressing you out?

 

Our lives are filled with “in-boxes” … from email in-boxes to your to-do lists to voice and text messages to a variety of different in-boxes in social networks such Facebook to work applications to RSS readers and bookmarked “to-read” articles and more.  Whew!

 

For many people, managing all these in-boxes is stressful, never-ending, and complex.  And for many more, simply checking their in-boxes is addictive.

 

So, how do we simplify things?  How do we clear our in-boxes and let go of the stress of managing them all?

 

In-boxes That Rule Our Lives – The following list of “in-boxes” is fairly typical for a lot of people.  Of course, your particular list will definitely vary, but this is an example:

 

•work email (by far the most sinister in-box)

•personal email

•instant messages (they in-box while in meetings and away from the computer)

•text messages

•missed phone calls and voicemail

•direct messages on Facebook

•@replies on Facebook

•friends items on Facebook

•@replies on Twitter

•direct messages on Twitter

•items in your personal to-do list

•calendar event requests

•unread items in my RSS feed reader

 

My personal list would be fairly similar, except that the main in-boxes I have today are:

 

•my Gmail in-box

•my AOL in-box

•Facebook direct messages and @replies

•my to-do list

•unread items in my RSS reader

 

I also have voicemail on my cell phone and home phone.  I don’t check other social networking sites. I don’t have a paper in-box.

 

What are your in-boxes? It may be useful to make a list of your own so you can plan your strategy.

 

Strategies for Clearing the In-boxes - So now that we know just how many in-boxes we have, how do we clear them or at least keep them manageable?  Here are my favorite strategies.  Also note that you won’t apply all strategies for every in-box … so pick the ones that work best.

 

1. Simplify your in-boxes.  Do you have 15-20 different in-boxes in your life?  You might try to simplify and see if you can get them down to 4-6, as I have (or even fewer if you’re bold).  This greatly simplifies things because you have fewer in-boxes to check every day.  A larger number of in-boxes is fine if they are already integrated into your daily routine — if you check them all in the morning and before you leave work, for example, and never have to check them at other times.  Or, if you always open a certain kind of software and check the in-box at certain times of the day, then that’s fine.  

 

But if you have to remember to keep checking a dozen or more in-boxes all the time, it gets difficult and stressful.  See what you can eliminate or consolidate.  For example, do you need more than one email in-box?  Do you need multiple voicemail in-boxes or even voicemail at all?  Do you need to be a part of 3 different social networks?  Are there things you rarely use that you can drop?  Give this a little thought.

 

2. Self service.  Banks and companies that sell tickets (like buying your airline ticket online) have figured out a way to avoid huge in-boxes by letting people serve themselves through technology.  So instead of lining up for a teller, there are ATMs everywhere. You can buy tickets through machines or online.  

 

So how do you use this to clear your in-boxes?  Figure out what types of requests are constantly coming at you — through work, even in your personal life, online, etc. — and try to figure out ways you can allow people to serve themselves. For example, do they need your approval on everything? Set up a list of criteria and allow them to approve things themselves if the criteria are met.  See if there are certain processes you can automate.  Take yourself out of the loop, and your in-boxes will shorten considerably.

 

3. Stop at the source.  Whenever I get a newsletter or other such mass email from a company, I automatically go to the bottom and click the “unsubscribe” link.  It takes a few seconds longer than just hitting “delete”, but it saves much more time in the long run.  I really dislike getting my in-box filled up with notices and newsletters and ads from companies.  What a waste of time having to sift through them all.  So I stop them at the source, so they no longer get sent to me.  If there is no easy way to unsubscribe, I hit the “spam” button.

 

By the way, the same is true for phone calls.  I list every telephone (cell and home) my wife and I have with the national Do Not Call list.

 

4. Filter out unnecessary stuff.  It only takes a minute or two to set up a filter in Gmail (or whatever email program you use), but as a result you’ll save a lot of time.  If you get certain notices you want to keep on file but don’t need to see in your in-box, filter them out to a folder just for those notices. Look at everything in your in-box to see what you don’t really need to see and find a way to filter those out.

 

For things like to-do lists, you might use a program (such as Taskpaper) that can use labels (such as @today) that you can use to filter out everything you don’t need to see today.  For example, when I click on the @today label on my to-do list, it only shows me the three things I plan to do today … not things I want to do later in the week.

 

There are many other tools that can do similar things for other in-boxes.  For example, you can use Tweetdeck to sort all the people you follow into groups, so you can filter out everybody but just your actual, real-life friends into one group, or your work colleagues in another group.

 

If you use a feed reader, you can also set up groups or folders so that you can just check the most essential feeds, instead of having to sift through everything in your unread folder.

 

5. Pick the most important.  An in-box is usually unsorted by priority, so that when you make a to-do list, you have things listed in order of when you wrote them down.  Most in-boxes have the most recent items at the top.  But that means you’re going to have to tackle everything, which can be overwhelming … or it means you’re going to have to continually scan through the entire in-box to pick out the most important.

 

Instead, find a way to choose the most important and just focus on those.  In emails, you might highlight everything in your in-box except 5 most important emails, and move everything except those 5 important ones to a “to-read” folder to look through later. Then just deal with those 5 important emails until your in-box is cleared.

 

With my to-do list, I mark my 3 most important tasks with an “@today” label so I can focus on just those.  With a to-read folder, just pick 3 important things to read for now.

 

6. Clear the rest.  Once you’ve picked out the most important, see if you can clear the rest, or at least shovel them somewhere else to deal with at a later time.  I’ve already mentioned how you can do this with your email in-box.  With a to-do list, you can put them in an @someday folder to deal with later. Delete things you will probably never get to, that you’ve been dreading doing and don’t absolutely need to do, or that are unnecessary.  Sometimes a big mass delete can be liberating.

 

7. Skim.  This is a good strategy for most in-boxes.  Instead of trying to process the whole thing, just skim and find the important or interesting items.  For example, if you use Twitter, you know that reading every message from every person you follow can quickly become a time-consuming (and stressful) burden. Instead, just skim to see what’s come in, and forget about the rest. The same applies to a to-read in-box (such as an RSS feed reader).  Don’t try to read everything.  Just skim.

 

8. Let go of the need to get to the end.  A lot of the stress that comes from managing in-boxes is rooted in a need we seem to have: we want to process every single item in the in-box and get it to be completely empty.  It’s like the old cartoons of a man sitting at a desk with a huge in-box and an empty out-box … and having to be reminded that on your deathbed you won’t care what your in-box looks like.

 

If we are not careful, the nature of in-boxes is that they’re never-ending.  You can get your email in-box to empty (and I recommend it — it’s deeply satisfying), but more emails will soon come in. Don’t stress out about this!  Just accept this fact of life.  The same comes from a to-read list: don’t try to read everything … there will always be more.  

 

When we accept this fact … that we’ll never get to the end of our to-do list, and that that’s OK … we can stop stressing about our in-boxes.  Just manage them smartly, and deal with the flow as it comes in.

 

“In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order.  I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.”
-Will Durant

 

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