In the previous article, I gave you some simple tips to help you get started organizing and clearing out your inbox such as creating simple personal folders, filing only the last message in a thread, deleting non-save-worthy email, and editing subjects.

Now we’re going to cover an important principle that will help you get through your inbox more quickly and thoroughly. Not only that, it will let you empty it out! It’s the Two Minute Rule!

Two Minutes Per Message

For every message in your inbox, there is a fine line between a message to read and a task to perform. Every message gets two minutes from you and no more. If it takes more than two minutes to read the message and file it, then it isn’t a message. It’s a task.

Grab the message and drag it right out of your inbox to your left until the pointer is over the tasks button on the left pane. Let go. A new task is created. If you right-click when you do this, you will find that you are presented with the option to make the message itself an attachment inside of a task. I like this because it preserves any attachments I have to complete in the original.

If you can read the message in about two minutes and don’t need to do anything as a result of it, then refer back to the rules of save-worthiness from the last article on clearing out your inbox and file it in the Active folder.

Here’s a trick - if you read slow or type slow, email will be a constant pain in your backside. Take a touch-typing class, no kidding, and increase your typing speed and you will greatly improve the rate at which you handle email, the amount of time you have at work, and the amount of work you can do. Read a book on speed reading (there is one reviewed on this site), and you will improve even further your ability to process email quickly.

The Rule of Emotional Replies

There is a rule that I would like to propose be observed by everyone on Earth everywhere. It is this:

Any reply written written in anger or frustration will cause more trouble than it could ever hope to solve.

Writing an angry email to anyone anywhere is like drinking a bottle of poison in order to get back at the person with whom you have chosen to become angry. When you get angry, you do so because you are afraid. Instead of writing email, when you get angry, ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” Then, take an hour, or a day, before you respond. Better yet, check your feelings with a work buddy and ask them to hold up a mirror and give you some guidance. 99% of the time, you will be told not to respond to the message at all.

File these messages away as tasks and respond to them later. Think of it this way: you need more than two minutes to write a really good response to an email you are ticked off about.

The Rule of One Handling

When you open a message, read it completely, and then reply to it in under two minutes or file it as a task. Do not handle any message twice by reading it, closing it, and then reading another message. By handling each message once and filing it decisively or replying immediately, you will greatly increase your efficiency.

But this also creates a danger. That danger is that you will reply to a message after someone else has already invalidated what you were going to write. Thus, you should…

Sort by Subject

I always sort my inbox by subject and read the most recent message and delete the others to avoid responding to an out-of-date message. Messages can get out of date in my office in about 12 minutes, so by the time I am choosing to respond to one, it could be completely obsolete. Find out what other people said first, then respond.

Most people sort their inbox by the received time and date, and they have a mish-mash of email in their inbox that is unorganized and coming out everywhere. I can look in any inbox with more than 40 messages in it and see that almost all of them have already been handled once but not filed or made into tasks. Plus, there will be many messages under the same subject sorted wrongly so that the last is not filed and the rest deleted.

I don’t know why we humans like to procrastinate so much, but we almost universally like to read messages as they come in and then go to read the next jumping from subject to subject. Then, later on, we will come back and try to sort them out and file some while deleting others. Invariably, this leads to your inbox getting out of control, filling up with messages, and then — EMAIL JAIL.

In the next installment, I’ll show you how to reduce the amount of email that arrives in your inbox.