Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your (literally) overflowing e-mail Inbox? Chances are, in addtion to work-related e-mails, and e-mails from your friends and family, you have signed up for several newsgroups, blog feeds, newsletters, and other mailing lists. They all provide valuable information for your personal or professional life. However, if you're not managing your Inbox effectively, you could end up with information overload and lots of stress (and who needs MORE stress?!!!)

Several clients of mine are experiencing "Inbox Anxiety" -- they are so overwhelmed by their over-stuffed e-mail Inbox that they started to avoid opening the Inbox to read any emails. Can you imagine what'd happen when you stop reading and deleting e-mails for a few WEEKS??? Yikes! I can tell you, it's NOT a pretty sight.

Jason Womack, a keynote speaker and executive coach, offers this simple tip to de-clutter and clean up your e-mail Inbox. He wrote:

"As you become faster, and better, it's more important than ever to clear the clutter. In too many cases, the e-mail inbox is a storage bin of items old and new, urgent and nice, pressing and overdue.

Multi-minding (forget multi-tasking; have you ever listened to a voice mail and read an e-mail at the same time? Can't be done at 100%…) only serves to distribute your focus. Instead, you want to engage and perform every time you open the inbox.

Here's how:

Change the incoming subject lines of your e-mails. (Easy to do in e-mail programs like Outlook and Lotus Notes.) As you review new items, identify your next action. Naturally, you don't want to repeatedly (ie: every time you scan your in-box) see an e-mail with a subject line that reads:

Re: re: re: FWD: budget meeting

Instead, review the message the first time you see it and change the subject line to something more actionable, such as:

draft initial presentation overview re: budget for Q3

This way, when you do open the inbox, you'll know what items you can / cannot do by simply reviewing the subject lines, instead of re-reading, and closing the same messages over and over again.

When e-mail users use this process of 'appropriately identifying the action' each e-mail represents, they usually wind up purging, sorting and organizing much of their inbox into other folders. This cleans the clutter, and makes it easier to perform at higher level of productivity and lower level of stress."

Labels: de-clutter, priority, productivity, stress management, time management