The Art of Processing The Mail
The name of the game is how to slow your pace. My team and I have an initiative we promote, taking back Sunday’s for Christ. To slow your pace, I am offering you a way to take back your Friday’s for yourself. It’s the only way you can take back your weekends and enjoy the time that’s rightfully yours. Society wants you to be busy everyday of your life. Causing stress. Causing burnout. Causing relationship issues. And so on. I’ve decided to share tips that will do the opposite and, at the same time, make you exceptional in all your do. Let’s continue.
Reacquaint yourself to email.
I hope I can do this topic justice. If you know me at all, you know I love email. It’s because of my love for email that I have email under my control and not out of control like most of the world around us. Out of control looks like hundreds of unread messages. It looks like thousands of messages in your inbox. It looks like an endless list similar to a string of social media posts that has no end. Email is electronic mail. It’s no different than the mail that arrives at your physical address. That means you check it as regularly as you want or need, but never every second of the day. I think I’ll do a more in depth post on that later.
What it (processing) does not mean?
Email is like that stack of paper that grows on the edge of your desk or inbox basket. The first one in is always the last one to come out no matter its importance. For me, processing email doesn’t mean I try to read or respond to all of the messages. It doesn’t mean stop at the really important ones because I see one I missed and should have read yesterday. You know the feeling? It doesn’t mean I finish answering one or create one I forgot to do the day before. All of these actions are tempting, but lead to a mound of email.
Then what does it (processing) mean?
Processing your email means, in simple terms, sorting through them to obtain an empty inbox. When you check your mail at home, you’ve become a master at sorting through the stack. You instantly remove all the junk. You place the bills (take-action stuff) into a pile, the magazines, newspapers and catalogs (stuff to read later) into another pile and the remainder into an I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-this less-important-stuff pile. In other words, you process your mail. It’s ready for you to tackle and go through because you and every other person knows that there will be another stack of this stuff tomorrow.
How I process email.
First I (you) will need to create a couple of folders. I suggest you don’t create a lot of folders, only 2-3. Keep it simple, remember it’s like a mailbox.
You have a couple of categories:
(1) stuff to take action on,
(2) stuff to read later and
(3) my favorite, the stuff you throw away.
So create these 3 folders. Next go through your email as quickly as you can to place them into these 3 folders. Once you do this, the only priority folder is the one you need to take action on. I can’t wait to give you more tips on this. I am an expert at processing. Until then, send me your questions or thoughts.
I know I squeezed a lot in today, but I want you to remember this information is not only good for you in the office, it actually works very well at home. Use it to transform your email, but more importantly use it to slow your pace by removing the email clutter and the noise it brings to your life.
Process all that email and learn how to make your day count.
Leave a Reply