One of my biggest problems at work is being forced into an event driven mode by responding to urgent emails as they come in. I have found that, even if I properly file actionable emails, store important information in a reference folder and so on, the very fact that my Inbox is staring me in the face drags me back into being event driven. Today, I hit upon a solution:

Hide my inbox!

That is, I have created various subfolders for different types of email underneath my inbox, and added filtering rules to make sure that every single new email goes into one of them. The result? My actual inbox looks empty. Furthermore, I can only see whether I have new emails by explicitly choosing to expand the inbox folder so that I can see what has arrived in the various subfolders.

So far it is working out really well. I can keep working on my actionable stuff, on the stuff I have decided is important and choose to scan my email every so often to make sure nothing is on fire. My aim is to gradually reduce my inbox scanning to a few times a day (first thing in the morning, after lunch, and late afternoon).

D