This post is part of the Empty Inbox series

Operating a successful and sustainable empty inbox is a process rather than a product. Unfortunately a sudden burst of productive work can’t save you from the chaos, consistency is the key to removing the stress from email.

Was the Stress Justified?

As you trawled though those hundreds of messages in you inbox you may have noticed how most email is only relevant for a short period of time and how most is remarkably unimportant and retrospectively unnecessary. So why did it seem so important before?

I believe that the ‘always-on’ mindset makes you spring to attention whenever that new message arrives. You feel the need to answer it there and then because it must be important. However with the use of hindsight how many of those message really needed to be dealt with immediately and how many could have waited?

Keep it Flowing

Think about when you started answering all the messages that just needed a quick response. I expect you found 5-10 minute periods where you were amazingly productive, where you had that single focus on retiring as many messages as you could. I even expect that you enjoyed these moments, sending those one line responses and making use of the delete key. In fact I know you enjoyed them, it feels awesome.

In my experience most people learn the following things from this series:

• You’ve been stressing about nothing when it comes to email
• Processing and quick responses are key
• You can always win the game if you play by your rules

Try to learn from all I have said here and think about how you would adjust your behavior accordingly. Changing the way you deal with email to be more productive cannot happen over night but over time you will be able to apply all I have said. For now though just congratulate yourself on identifying the problem and finding out how you can go about solving it.