You vs. Your Inbox
To Get Your Inbox Under Control, Send Better Emails
You might be the source of your own stress
I’m here to confess to some of my most heinous email sins. I’ve left subject lines blank. I’ve sent questions at 5 p.m. on a Friday with no clear deadline. I’ve concluded a half-baked idea with: “Thoughts?”
And I haven’t been much better at receiving emails than I’ve been at sending them. My inbox is an ever-growing graveyard of emails I’ve neglected to file, archive, delete, or even open. Staying fully on top of incoming messages can feel like an overwhelming task on a good day, and a Herculean one on a bad day. So for a long time, my go-to strategy was: Don’t bother.
But recently I came to understand that my unmanageable inbox was a direct result of the way I composed my own messages. This realization changed my life: Bad email begets bad email. The only way to break the cycle is to send better emails in the first place.
The first step in my journey to email enlightenment was more or less an accident. I happened to notice, in the signature of an email I’d received at work, a line declaring that the sender subscribed to something called “the Email Charter.”
