Inbox overloaded?
Almost anyone using an electronic device today, finds themselves overloaded with information: promotions, advertising, emails, notifications, popups, news bits and much, much more. What does one do with it all?
There are two paths to working on this problem of information overload: either the standard, expected way or the very radical different way.
The standard way
The standard way of dealing with information overload can be summed up with ‘delete, divert and discard.’ Delete messages at the very start, ones you know you will have no need to keep. Next, divert messages to appropriate folders where you will handle them at some future time in a way relevant to your needs and how you handle this particular kind of information normally. Finally, ‘discard?’ As you work along you will discover more junk or see information you now view as junk…so, discard it now.
Using the described process, you should eliminate the bulk of the junk that your inbox contains. Be brutal, be ruthless…the whole point of the process is to reduce your inbox to just the useful stuff. Get rid of the junk.
The cleaning up of informational overload takes time. There is no way to get around that. An added process you can learn and use is filtering. Gmail has a feature that permits you to ‘mark’ inbox messages and carry out a dedicated action on that kind of mail in the future. So you can mark say something from ‘blah de blah’ and have it deleted from your computer. Using the Filter process means future messages from that source will be handled the same way. This will also help reduce the time you spend in cleaning up your inbox.
The radical way
Dr. Andrea Wilkinson, a Phd in brain study and founder of Brainshape.ca, suggests a very different approach to dealing with email/inbox information overload. Dr. Andrea focusses on a person’s well-being more than on a person’s productivity. She feels that directing attention on the inbox at the start results in stress, anxiety and unnecessary de-energizing in a person.
Dr. Andrea’s strategy is to develop positive energy within oneself. To do this, a person should avoid touching email at the outset, but instead one should lay out a blueprint of what wants to do or achieve in the workday. So begin your work by creating a rough to-do list of what you want to do for the day, spending no more than 20-30 minutes on the task This puts one’s emotions into a positive state. One sees what one plans to do, refines it into a workable task list and begins to feel positive about the day as the day’s road map is set.
Dr. Andrea states that her approach needs repeated effort as there are developed habits a person must change before they can reap the positive feelings her strategy will develop. Try it for a period of about a week breaking an old way of working and developing a whole new approach to managing your information overload.
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