As a time and productivity management speaker
and author, I see it all the time. People just don't use their inboxes properly. And these mistakes lead to significant distraction, lost time, and rework. Most people use their e-mail inbox in four specific ways, and only one of those ways is correct:

1. (The Correct Use): To Receive and Process New Messages . The key reason you have an inbox is to receive new items in that inbox. Your goal is to quickly and efficiently figure out what those items are, and then properly process them. If you've ever attended one of my courses, you know that you handle the quick ones immediately, and you put the longer items on either your task list or your calendar, thus allowing you to plan and prioritize. After you either get them “done” or “tasked”, you can either delete those messages or file them for later reference. And if you don't have a good place to file them, you make one and put it there. This is really the only way to use an inbox.

2. As your de facto yet highly disorganized daily task list. So many people use their e-mail inbox as their default task list. It isn't at all built for that. It is hard to prioritize individual items in an inbox, so you end up looking at the same items multiple times, trying to figure out which ones are important and/or urgent, and which ones aren't. Most tasking programs, including tools like MS Outlook, Toodledo, and Google Tasks, allow you to see your tasks in priority order by either date or by project (I teach courses on this!) Very quickly, you can figure out what is either most urgent or important. (Even a properly-designed paper task list can do this!) Thus, you can understand why I'm trying to get people out of the habit of “inbox tasking”, and into the habit of building a smart daily task list using an appropriate task tool each and every day. READ MORE