Taking Your Time - Time Hacks, Tips, and Principles

Aug 31, 2021

Four tactical ways to achieve inbox zero and peace of mind

In today's episode, we're going to get extremely tactical and talk about how to achieve inbox zero, an empty inbox, which is a concept first pioneered by Merlin Mann. Welcome to the taking your time podcast. Hello time hackers today, we're going to get tactical and practical with our inboxes. And there is a term for this it's called inbox zero. And it was this idea that came about the mid two thousands by this. Guy named Merlin Mann. And back in the mid two thousands, it was a problem, but it wasn't nearly as much of a problem as it is today. There's really no traffic cop when it comes to email. So there's no cost for spammers or marketers or anyone to really send as much email as they can to achieve their goals. There's really nothing. You know, Prevent chain emails. There's some spam technology. Out there, but of course. Spammers get more sophisticated. What we're going to do today is really talk about four different ways that you can tackle this problem of getting to inbox zero. And it's really about making sure that this becomes a daily practice. It's actually very reasonable to do. It seems really hard. And you might need to do a little bit of what I call email bankruptcy. And I'll talk about that, but it is manageable. You have to set aside time every single day, but there's four things. That you can do, and we'll go over each of those four things here in the podcast today. Before we go into that, I think it's important to understand that. The ability to have a high velocity with your email. And that means in and out doesn't necessarily correlate to greater productivity. In fact, slack did some research and it showed that 53% of what they call hyper connectors that are those that are receiving 50 to a hundred emails a day. They find access to information. Challenging. But here's the crazy part. They find it challenging at a 10% higher rate. Than moderate email users. That means they get more email than their counterparts, but they find it more difficult to get information. This correlation is not always causation, but I think there is some logic here in that getting more email doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to make it easier for you to get access to the communication that you want. It may not even be an email. You may need to find some other channel to get that piece of information you're looking for.

14 min