Hi, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity. I want to thank you for all of your comments and questions on my last video.
It's so great to see people get excited about spending less time with their email. Remember, the average professional currently spends 6.3 hours a day dealing with email, and that's simply way too much time in our inboxes.
It takes us away from our more important work and our most important projects. For nearly a decade, I've been helping people be more effective and efficient with their workday, and dealing with email is such a core part of being more productive.
As a former IT manager, I used to receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of new emails each and every day. I know firsthand what it feels like to suffer from inbox overload.
But over time, I was able to apply a few simple techniques to drastically reduce my relationship with email. So much so that I was able to deal with email as little as three or four times a day.
So how did I do it? How did I drastically reduce the amount of time that I spend with my email?
Well, I want to show you one of those techniques right now, something that you can apply right away to help you reduce the amount of time you spend with email. One of the most frustrating things when it comes to dealing with email is determining which messages need our attention and which messages we can ignore.
It often leads to a lot of stress as we arrive at an inbox overflowing with new messages and determining where should we put our attention. Now, most of us tend to work through our email in some type of chronological or top-down manner.
We start at the top of our list and we determine, does this need my attention, does this need my reply? No, move on to the next one.
But when we do get to a message that does need our attention or does need a reply, we do it immediately. And the longer we spend with that message or subsequent messages, the longer it's going to take us to get to messages later on in the list.
In many cases, there are very important messages waiting for us there as well. So the longer I spend on this message, for example, if I spend a few minutes grabbing an attachment, maybe referring to another email before I can give a complete reply, it means that several minutes have gone by before I get to something which perhaps needs my attention now.
So I want to show you a simple way, something that you can apply to any email client, so you can quickly process through a large number of emails in just a matter of minutes. Now, in this example, I only have about eight emails, but the exact same principle applies whether you have 18, 80, or even 800 emails waiting for you in your inbox.
You will notice on the left-hand side, there is a section that shows my folders. In all caps, I have a folder labeled "needs action."
This is the key folder that we're going to be using for this process. Everything that requires our attention, everything that's important and needs a reply from us, is going to go into this folder.
Everything else is either going to be archived or deleted. Archived if we think we may need to reference it later in the future, deleted if we're pretty sure we will never need to lay eyes on it ever again.
So we're in our inbox. This is how it works.
I get to my first message and I say nope, doesn't need anything here, I'm gonna drag it to my archive. Nope, nothing important here, I don't need to reply, maybe I'll need to reference it again, I'm gonna put it to my archive.
No, just information, let's archive that. Oh, this one does need my attention and it needs a thoughtful reply, I'm going to drag it to my needs action folder.
Next one, no, I can archive that. This one, no, nothing important here, archive.
This one, oh yes, I do need to address this, let's put that in my needs action folder. And the last one is just a receipt, I'm gonna put it in my archive folder.
Now my inbox is cleared. I've gone through everything in my inbox, and I can click on my needs action folder, and there are the only two in that set that I just went through, the only two emails that really need my attention.
Now, with myself outside of my inbox, I can focus exclusively only on those messages that require my attention. I may be receiving new emails as I'm replying to these messages, and that's perfectly okay.
We receive emails throughout the day. The goal is not to keep your inbox at zero, but now I can focus on the messages that require my attention.
Once I'm done, I will again go and archive those messages. So create your own needs action folder, or maybe it could be labeled "needs a reply."
It doesn't matter what you call it, create a separate folder so that you can quickly filter out those messages that you need to reply to from your inbox. In my next video, I'm going to be answering your most frequently asked questions, so please be sure to drop a line in the comment section below.
I'm really looking forward to hearing more about what you have to say. Thanks so much for watching this video, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
