Is Your Messy Inbox Driving You Nuts? Use These Tips — They Helped Me!

Until a few months ago, my email inbox was the bane of my existence. It drove me crazy! I had so many junk and internal emails that important messages kept getting buried. Sometimes I’d forget to respond to someone, their email would disappear into the mess, and I’d get back to them days later than I wanted to.

I swear, I tried to stay organized. I created about a million folders and sorted my Outlook inbox into them as best I could. But I could never keep up! Even when I checked my email all day (at my desk at work, on my phone, etc.) I never managed to clean up my inbox.

Then, I found Leverage’s Inbox Zero course.

Guys, I’m not kidding when I say this Inbox Zero program changed my life. Leverage designed it around Nick Sonnenberg’s book “Come Up for Air.” It’s supposed to reduce the time you spend on email and the stress of a cluttered inbox — and it actually works! I sat in on a group call with other people, then had one-on-one training with the team at Leverage, and they helped me make my inbox more efficient.

Here are a few helpful things I learned along the way.

• Email isn’t an efficient tool for internal communication. When computer programmers invented email decades ago, people used it for everything. It was a hammer, and every communication problem was a nail! But we’ve come a long way since then. If you’re bogged down in internal emails, you can reduce them by using a tool like Microsoft Teams or Slack to talk to your team.
• You shouldn’t store documents in your email. If someone sends you a document, keeping it in your inbox or a folder seems quick and easy — but it’s actually more cumbersome than saving the document. If you keep it in your email, other people in your organization won’t be able to find it without asking you for help.
• The fewer folders you have, the easier organizing will be. Before taking the Inbox Zero course, I had tons of folders to sort my emails into. Now, I’ve pared down to three: Archive, Optional, and Main Inbox. This really helped me with decision fatigue! Now, I know exactly where each email belongs, and I don’t have to waste time hunting through different folders looking for one particular message.

Thanks to the Inbox Zero course, I now start and end the day with just 10-15 emails in my inbox instead of hundreds. The course really helped me, and if you’re fighting with your email all the time, it can probably help you too!

To learn more and to try it out, click here to check out GetLeverage.com/Josh