Martin Crockett

How to empty an inbox

Perform these three steps to empty any e-mail inbox.

• Step 1: Delete all the spam. (Users should set up mail filters to automatically delete some of the more frequent spam messages, but they’ll always have to delete some spam by hand.) The next section, How to Delete Spam, explains this step in detail.
• Step 2: Read any personal mail from friends or family, then do whatever you want with it - print or save it somewhere else on the computer - after which you must delete those messages from the inbox. (Corporate users may have to skip this step if they’re not allowed to receive personal e-mail at work.) With the first two steps completed, the remaining messages in the inbox are somewhere between too irrelevant to read (spam) and too relevant to delay reading (personal mail). In preparation for Step 3, make sure that the inbox messages are sorted by date, with the oldest message on the top of the list.
• Step 3: Open each message, from top to bottom of the inbox, engage it - that is, take some action - then delete it from the inbox. When this step is done, the inbox will be empty.

Step 3 in detail: How to engage an e-mail
The specific action for engaging an e-mail depends on the type of e-mail. At this point, remember, spams and personal mails are already gone from the inbox. The three remaining types of e-mails are newsletters, FYIs, and to-dos.

Newsletters: Read (or scan) newsletters quickly, depending on how much time is available, then delete. If you have very little time and lots of other e-mails to engage, then quickly scan the headlines and delete the newsletter. If you have more time, feel free to read more of the newsletter. But whatever you do, don’t save or file the newsletter, since when the next issue arrives there will be two issues waiting for attention. (By the way, this assumes that you already prune your newsletter “diet” to minimize any unnecessary subscribed e-mails.)

FYIs: These are non-actionable pieces of information: for example, an answer to a question, or a notification of an event. An FYI might also be a BCC of your own outgoing message to someone else. Whatever it is, read the FYI, file it if necessary, then delete it. Note that filing may involve scheduling an activity, like a meeting or appointment, on the calendar. In any case, the FYI must be deleted afterward.

To-dos: Use the “two-minute rule” for to-dos: if it takes two minutes or less to complete, do it immediately (even if it means physically getting up from your chair), and then delete the e-mail. If the to-do would require more than two minutes of your time, add it to your to-do list (which must exist outside the inbox), then delete it. Note that you must delete each e-mail after you engage it. You might file or save an e-mail elsewhere before deleting, but no e-mail may remain in the inbox. Remember: the inbox is only for accepting incoming e-mail, not for storing it. E-mails, no matter what kind or how important, are only allowed to stay temporarily in the inbox.