Do It! Declare Email Bankruptcy!

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll give my argument for why I think you should declare email bankruptcy.

If you are watching this video, you probably don’t have just like 35 emails in your inbox, right?  My guess is you have hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands.  In fact, you probably have that many UNREAD emails.  So your email badge looks something like this?

This probably feels a little overwhelming.  So, what are the drawbacks to having that many emails?

• You miss stuff.  It is hard to remember what you have responded to and what you haven’t gotten to yet if you don’t have that reminder in your inbox. And we all get so many emails per day that important emails just get pushed farther and farther down into your inbox.  So if you find that you have forgotten to put an event on your calendar or forgotten to respond to an important email, it may be time for a new system.
• You can’t find stuff.   If you have 10,000 emails in your inbox with 3,000 unread, it’s gonna be hard to find exactly that email you’re looking for. You will have to weed through a lot of unrelated emails to find things — if you are able to find it at all. And finally,
• You miss urgent emails.  Because you have so many unread emails, the number on the badge — or the number of unread emails — becomes unimportant, so you stop relying on that number to let you know that you have new emails to attend to.   If you get an email that is urgent, it can slip through the cracks, and get buried underneath other new emails and hidden within all the emails you have not yet read. 

I’m obviously not telling you anything new here. After all, I doubt you really WANT to have that many emails in your inbox. But do you really have to go through every single one in order to get your inbox under control again? That could literally take days or weeks to read through thousands of emails! 

This is why I think you should declare email bankruptcy. It will give you a clean slate, allow you to start over, and it won’t take a hideous amount of time.  Doesn’t that sound liberating? 

Let me just quickly address the two main concerns about email bankruptcy:

• I’ll lose all of my stuff.  There is a step in this process that allows you to archive most of the important things in your inbox. But even if you don’t, chances are, if you really need an email, there are ways to get your hands on it. People’s computers die all the time, their phones get trashed, and even so, they figure out a way to resurrect or do without this information eventually.
• People are waiting for responses from me. Are they? Really? Are you going to answer them? Using this process, instead, people who are really waiting for a response from you will have an opportunity to reach out to you again. And this will give them (let’s face it) a much better shot at actually getting a response from you than waiting on an email that they sent several months ago that is just sitting in your inbox. 

Okay — here’s the email bankruptcy process:

1. Create a Saved folder.  If you don’t already have one, create an Saved email folder or, even better, a file structure to save your emails. It doesn’t need to be complicated – in fact, it’s better if it’s simple with fewer folders. If you are using any modern email systems, the search functions are so advanced that we no longer have to rely on physical locations to find our stuff.  At a minimum, create one folder that’s called Saved Emails.
2. Save specific emails from your inbox.   There are two ways to do this: the fast/lazy way or the longer/better way. The lazy way has you archive all 10,000 emails from your inbox into your saved folder. But hear me out – that’s a total waste of space. You don’t need all those emails.  Start at the earliest date and start skimming your email folders in batches of 50. Only save those that have any importance. Sometimes filtering for attachments helps you to find the important emails. Everything else should just be deleted. If this process is too overwhelming, then just save everything. Keep only the emails from the past 7 days in your inbox.
3. Write a list of names. As you are going through your inbox, start keeping a list of people who might be expecting a response from you — even if it’s from a long time ago.  
4. Write a bankruptcy email.  You don’t need to send it to every person in your contact list.  Only to the people who may be waiting for something from you. Let them all know that you have declared email bankruptcy and that if they are waiting for something from you, they should send the request again.
5. Establish a new email protocol. Obviously, if you don’t do anything different, you’re gonna end up in the same place in a couple of months. You need to change your system. Here’s my advice, your email inbox is not a to do list. Don’t treat it like one. It is a staging ground only. I get to email inbox zero at least once per day.  I couldn’t do that if I treated my inbox like a to do list.   Here’s the process I use — you are welcome to use it or modify it based on your own proclivities: 
1. Go through your inbox at least once per day to deal with each item
2. With each item, do one of these actions: delete, file, act, or put on a task list.  I delete emails I won’t need later.  I file emails that I might need for reference, but that don’t require an action from me — put these in your Saved folder.  I act on emails where I need to do something but only if I can complete it in 2m or less.  Everything else that requires a longer action goes on my task list to be taken care of later. 
6. Try out your new system on this week’s emails that are still in your inbox.  You are new at this, so it’s going to take longer the first time. Budget about 2m per email for this first time through.  After that, it should take no more than 30 minutes once a day — as long as you are keeping to the  2m or less rule for action items.  Obviously it may take longer than 30m to take care of all of the longer actions from your email —  but you should handle those longer actions just as you would actions from a meeting — in whatever task management system you already use. 

See?  Inbox zero makes you feel like you’re on top of the world!   Now you just need to get into the habit of cleaning out your inbox once per day and putting things in a regular task management system. This should also motivate you to unsubscribe from all of that junk mail that is surely clogging up your inbox daily.  If you are interested I have a video on establishing a junk email address. 

Declaring email bankruptcy will let you find things, respond to requests in a timely manner, and feel like you are generally on top of your life. Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!