One reason I posted my intention to clean out my inbox, rather than just write about it afterward, was to give me some accountability. Going public with my plan has been keeping it at the front of my mind—pushing me to actually do something I’ve been thinking about doing for months. But it isn’t done yet.

So here’s what I’m noticing.

The hugeness barrier

I’m loosely following Mark Hurst’s cleanup guidelines in Bit Literacy. He insists that a pristine inbox starts with one intense purging session (what he calls the Induction process). Devote a couple of hours to nothing but shoveling? I thought I was game for it, but gee, somehow that three- to four-hour window just never seemed to materialize. And my resistance to the task was only growing as time passed. So I decided to buck Hurst’s prescription and tackle the job in stages.

I’m happy to report that in one hour I pared things down from 251 messages to 156. Not bad. What helped:

• Sort. This is a Hurst technique I liked. I sorted by subject line first, which tended to put the newsletters and other related messages together…making it easier to delete the older stuff.

• Create new folders, as many as you want. My half-tongue-in-cheek plan to create a “Read-contemplate-decide” folder really did work. I created an “Inspiration” folder too. I even made a subfolder for one particular author. Don’t those folders sort of overlap? Who cares? Now I have a place to file all the messages and articles I’ve been meaning to re-read in hopes they would Change My Entire Way of Functioning In the World. Zoom, zoom, zoom, file, file, file. Will I read them now that they’re in the folders? Who knows? But I wasn’t reading those articles when they languished in my inbox, and now they’re not causing me stress.

• Use the one-minute rule. For this, I thank my commenters. I’ve never liked the much-recommended guideline that says: Handle immediately any email containing a task that will take two minutes or less to finish. Let’s face it, an inbox full of two-minute tasks will take a lot longer than a few hours to get through, making the whole cleanup project look even more unpleasant. Sharon Anderson suggested, instead, tackling emails that look like they’ll be one-minute tasks. I’ve been using a timer to see how much I really can get done in a minute, and even when the action takes longer, the one-minute goal keeps me alert and moving quickly. (I use a timer that counts up, not down, so that I don’t have to hear the preachy old “ding” and feel like I messed up. I just note how long the task actually took.)

Everything else gets entered in the calendar or added to the to-do list.

I’ve been waiting for another hour to materialize so I can get through the rest of the inbox, but the idea of spending another hour on this is feeling kind of oppressive. So I’m interested to see how many messages I can clear out in, let’s say, a half-hour, or even 15 minutes.

The moral I keep coming back to:

No matter how much you like the sound of somebody else’s method, don’t wait too long to spin it your own way.

Onward…

There are good reasons do to it: All those undealt-with messages create background stress. And it’s a waste of time to keep re-opening the same messages only to continue leaving them there, unresolved.

But like so many vaunted time management strategies, the empty inbox is hard to maintain once you’re past the initial exhilaration of seeing it nice and clean.

Ah, emptiness

I’ve been reading Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy. Hurst certainly isn’t the first to recommend clearing out your inbox regularly. (Merlin Mann, for one, is writing a book about it.) But I like that Hurst doesn’t make things too complicated. With each message your choices are to…

• delete or file it (if it’s an FYI);
• act on it (if the action takes under two minutes) and then delete it; or
• add the task to your to-do list (if it will take longer than two minutes), then delete it.

Something else I like: He recommends dealing with personal email first—savoring it. OK, that’s different! I’m all for rewarding yourself first and making personal life primary. That’s a value that draws a lot of us to the entrepreneurial life.

Now, in order to get to that happy “Steady-state” where the emails are flowing right along day after day, you must first go through the radical process of “Induction”—clearing out your inbox in one intense session lasting several hours. (BTW, note that Hurst has achieved the minimum requirement for a bestselling time management philosophy—cool terms for common functions.) During Induction, you have to be especially tough (brutal) about unread newsletters and such. Delete, delete, delete.

Then you sort so that the oldest messages are on top and deal with them one by one: either file, take quick action, or plunk them onto your to-do list. And delete.

And none of this almost-empty business for Hurst. It’s gotta be all the way to zero. Otherwise, he argues, you’re doing the hard work without getting the nice refreshing payoff of total emptiness. Plus the emails that accumulate tend to be complex, making it progressively harder to get back to that blissful empty state.

Getting ready for the purge

I’m gearing up to tackle my own inbox, which has 223 emails in it right now. I want this to work, so I’m thinking through potential obstacles. My reservations:

- Can Induction really be completed in a few hours? And am I OK with the level of brutality required?

- What do I do about the emails that require pondering? The ones that contain messages or that link to articles worth contemplating (maybe for future blog posts), or rereading, or printing out, or deciding about, or…? I think I know the answer to this—move them into their own folder, called something like “Read-contemplate-decide”—maybe a subfolder in my Blog ideas folder. Or print them out to take with me for when I’m waiting at the bus stop or the checkout line. I’ve been leaving them in the inbox to remind me to read-contemplate-decide-blog-about them. Since I’m not doing the reading, this system isn’t working. We’ll see if shoveling them into a folder works better.

- How do I manage that consarned two-minute guideline? Tasks that should take me two minutes nearly always take longer. Not sure if that’s from me being a perfectionist or being overly optimistic about estimating time or what. Maybe I’ll just track myself for a while—set the timer for each supposedly-two-minute action, see how long the task actually takes, and find out if my speed or estimating skills improve. I’m also skeptical about whether this two-minute campaign will get me through the whole inbox in a few hours. (Calculating: two minutes over two hours equals 60 emails—I’ve got a lot more than 60 to get through.)

As with my paper clutter,  a lot of the clutter in my inbox represents good intentions…not to mention decisions I still need to make and don’t want to. Maybe I need an email folder called Good Intentions! And another one called Decisions! I’m wondering whether a similar approach to the one I’m trying to take with paper (talk about the idea the message represents, blog about it, trust my good sense and life experience so I can let the message go) would work for my electronic clutter.

Anyway—I’m going to experiment and see how long Induction actually takes, what the stumbling blocks are, and whether it’s really worth it to keep my inbox empty. Hurst says to empty it at least once a day, the end of the day being a logical time to do this.

An important thing I want to pay attention to is: when any part of the process takes too long, where am I getting stuck?

Here goes. Tea and chocolate at the ready. I’ll report back.