A friend sent me the following message the other day:

I’m drowning from re-entry from a 2 week vacation.

Do I prioritize the work I deferred prior to leaving or do I focus time on processing the 1500+ emails I received while I was away?

Do today’s new inputs (e-mails, texts, and voicemails) take precedence over these two other sources of tasks?

Any guidance would be super!

Where to begin?

This can all be tackled and taken care of -- with the right method. David Allen has a fantastic method for taking this overwhelming amount of stuff and converting it into manageable actions. I say this because I've used this approach for more than 20 years, and it works.

I gave my friend the five steps from David's bestseller, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity:

Continue Reading: "Getting back from vacation: how to recover" » From the makers of "Conference Call in Real Life" comes another viral sensation that's sweeping the nation! See how many email mistakes and bad habits you can spot:

Here are a couple I'd like to point out:

• If you really need a report (or anything else) ASAP, email is probably not the best way to ask (especially if your reader is getting hundreds of emails a day)
• Only use "Reply All" if every single person in the conversation needs to know what you're saying

Yes, Tripp & Tyler are right that people use email for the wrong things. But that doesn't make it a bad tool. Like we've said before, email is not the problem: how people use it is the problem.

Would this be a bad time to repeat that you can get our Top 10 Email Tips by following this blog? These are completely, 100% guaranteed to make everyone want to respond to every one of your emails, all the time.*

Best,

Nathan

@eProductivity
FB: eProductivity

*Unless they don't feel like it, or yours is the 180th email they've received today, or they're in a meeting, in which case the full faith of this absolute guarantee is annulled, abrogated, eliminated, invalidated, abolished, expunged, undone, and annihilated. The tips are still good, though, and with them you're still more likely to get a response than without. And they're free!

In an hour, I went from about 120 emails (in five inboxes) to 0.

For the first time in months, I saw this:



This felt so good to achieve.

If you've never experienced this, it's hard to understand -- it just feels so clean and complete. Can you imagine that being your inbox (even if you don't use an iPhone)?

Here's how I did it. As I looked at each email, one at a time, I chose what to:

Continue Reading: "Have you ever experienced an empty inbox? Here's how" »

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