I was really impressed by Rob @ Beyond Norm’s innovative Zero Inbox Strategy in January. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Rob vowed to empty his inbox on a daily basis and achieve zero emails lurking down the bottom of his To Do List before finally falling off it altogether.
Now as a virtual assistant, most of my communication is via email. Per day I probably receive over 200 emails as a conservative estimate. It’s simply not possible to deal with all of them, and not all of them need actioned straight away. But how realistic was it to adopt this strategy myself? Now of course I have various folders and automatic responses and CCs working hard for me. But I still had lots of emails in my inbox because “I’ll get round to them later”.
Well, I’m rather pleased to say that the Zero Inbox Strategy has worked rather well – the key to it is, of course, to start from a blank canvass. Be brutal. Delete/archive them all and start afresh with any new that comes in.
I found that I saved loads of emails which were completely pointless. And that I ummed far more than necessary over what I should do with an email, because without the impetus to only deal with it once, you just leave it lying there.
So did it work? Well as of this moment, I have a total of 3 emails in my inbox – and they are all pertinent to tasks I have to do tomorrow morning. An outstanding success!