It’s one thing to have an inbox that’s full because nothing has ever been cleared out of it; it’s all stuff that has been read, but never filed. Dealing with that kind of overflowing inbox is fairly straightforward. But what if it’s full of unread messages?
For example, have you ever gotten back from a holiday to find your inbox filled to the brim with unread messages? How do you tackle it? What do you do when you know there’s no way you can get it down to zero in one or even a few sittings?
When I find myself in this situation, I use the 10% rule. When I am sitting down to process my email, I know that I can get rid of at least 10% of the messages in the backlog. This means the 10% refers to messages that are not new ones that came in since the last time I processed my inbox – all the new ones will be dealt with as well.
Think about it; if you’re a typical user, probably half of the messages in your newly-overflowing inbox are bulk mail subscriptions that you only scan anyway. Someone tagged you on a photo in Facebook? It’ll take you 10 seconds to view the image, 20 if you comment, then delete the notification from your inbox. Do that a bunch of times, and you’ll have knocked off 10% of your backlog in no time.
The first few times you sit down to process your inbox, it should be pretty easy to get rid of 10% of your email backlog. And the beauty of this technique is that as you get rid of the low-hanging fruit and it becomes more difficult to get things out of your inbox, you will have already reduced the overall number of messages substantially. This means that the 10% you need to get rid of is constantly diminishing in size, as the likely difficulty of dealing with the emails increases. With a bit of work your backlog will get small enough that you can just knock the last few stragglers off, and voila: you have an empty inbox!
This technique can be of some benefit if you’re in that first category of people that has a full inbox of messages you’ve read, but still plan to do something about. But if you’re using your inbox as a task list, you probably won’t ever actually get your inbox completely emptied.
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