Imagine opening your inbox without a sense of dread, knowing exactly what's there and that you’re in control—no more guessing, no more stress.
Do you ever worry subconsciously about what's lurking in your 100(0)+ emails? Do you check an email and then don’t deal with it and it then leaves an unfinished thread/worry in your head?
Well imagine knowing consciously how much work you have in your inbox. Imagine losing that stress of what surprises are lurking in your inbox or thinking what did I miss? Inbox Clarity is a technique that is easy to apply, fairly easy to stay on top of and very quick to recover back to. Once you try it, you will not want to go back to the way things were.
Let’s take a moment to unpack why email often becomes a chore instead of a tool and why our personal approach to email is broken. The obvious is that sending an email is so much easier than getting up and talking to someone, especially in this new hybrid/remote working world. The less obvious is that by sending an email we often feel like we have done something, we have passed the action on, it's someone else's issue now. This is asynchronous communication, as in transactional and very often not completed in a single step. I would bet that often you don’t get the full information you need to complete the action or full amount of information that you need to digest. I would also suggest you never take the time to give the recipient the full information they need. Email is a way of throwing work over the fence.
The other key problem is we feel because someone sent something it needs to be responded to and responded to asap. Not taking into account our own, planned priorities. It's all too easy to jump to that email that just came in and do it rather than the harder, deeper task in front of us.
All of this takes us to a constant send, respond pattern that generates more emails and distracts us from what needs to be done.
Therefore, I suspect you are like the many that have 100s of emails “unread” in your inbox. At various points in the day, you look at your inbox and action either the latest one or the one that looks easy and/or interesting. I wonder, was the trigger for you to check again that you saw notification on your task bar? I be that count of 100+, 1000+! causes you anxiety.
Most people, myself included, leave emails unread as they are un-actioned. In the case above most are actually unread.
Maybe you instantly file it in a related folder.
Either way your inbox or email count is constantly going up. There are probably loads of emails in there that have already missed their deadline.
This is my approach to solve these problems, I call it Inbox Clarity to reduce stress, reduce emails and increase control for when I do emails.