Make peace with your inbox using the “Yesterbox” technique.
Email can be exhausting. It piles up, it never stops. Sometimes it makes you feel like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.
Tony Hsieh, the wildly successful founder and CEO of online clothing seller Zappos use to feel the same way:
“In 2012, I felt like my email had gotten out of control. I felt like it was a never-ending treadmill…
At the end of 2012, I started experimenting with an email management technique which has actually worked out surprisingly well for me, and I’d love for more people to try it out and share it with others. I call my technique “Yesterbox”, because the basic premise is that each day your to do list is yesterday’s inbox instead of today’s inbox.”
Here’s how Hsieh describes the method:
- Your “to do” list each day is simply yesterday’s email inbox (“Yesterbox”). Each day you know exactly how many emails you have to get through. There’s a sense of progress as you process each email from yesterday and remove it from your inbox.
- If it can wait 48 hours without causing harm, then you are not allowed to respond to any emails that come in today, even if it’s a simple one-word reply. This is the part that really takes a lot of discipline for the first week or so, because it is really really tempting to respond to emails that come in.
- When processing yesterday’s inbox, you must process 10 of yesterday’s emails before you’re allowed to look at any emails that are coming in today. After you’ve processed 10 (meaning removed them from yesterday’s inbox either by replying, filing, deleting, or calendaring them (more on that below), then your “reward” is that you get to read the new emails that have come in.
- We’re all guilty of procrastinating and looking for the easy emails to respond to first. By forcing yourself to do 10 at a time of yesterday’s emails (and not allowing yourself to read any new emails that come in today until you do 10 from yesterday), it’s a lot easier to power through the annoying or harder ones.
- Calendaring: For any email from yesterday that takes more than 10 minutes to respond, or requires additional research, etc., you should simply set up a meeting on your calender to do it.
- If you fall behind and have emails that are older than yesterday’s inbox (yes, it still happens), schedule additional time on your calendar to catch up to emails older than yesterday’s inbox.
Hsieh encourages people to share this idea with friends (hence, this post) with the hope that more people will adopt the Yesterbox technique, thereby helping more people feel in control and less-stressed.
Have a great week.
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