Part 1 of a 2-part article

As the meeting was wrapping up, the subject of emails creeped into the conversation. Participants became animated around the number of electronic communications they had to manage on a daily basis.

Curious, I asked, “How many emails do each of you have in your inbox right now?”

I was not surprised to hear that the majority had over 1,000 and that several members had an inbox with over 20,000.

“Why do you have so many?” I asked.

The responses ranged from sheepish to defiant.

“I’ve always done it this way.”

“I want to have a record of all my communications.”

“It got out of hand, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I know where everything is.”

“I don’t know, no one every talked to me about doing anything different.”

The quantities of emails reminded me of the title of the classic story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne. The book follows Professor Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and harpooner Ned Land as they are captured by the mysterious Captain Nemo and taken aboard his advanced submarine, the Nautilus.

Twenty thousand leagues measure out to about 50,000 miles (or 80,000 kilometers). Twenty thousand emails at 125 words each, add up to 2,500,000 words sitting idle.

So, what about you? Is your email inbox flooded with leagues and leagues of sunken communication, sitting on the bottom of an ocean of outdated correspondence? Let’s get you a way to get your head above water and your inbox in shallow waters.

Small Incremental Steps

I have had James Clear’s book Atomic Habits in my library for years. On a recent long road trip, my wife and I decided to listen to it in the car. I was reminded of how small and consistent changes can have a huge impact over time. Clear highlights the impact of making minute adjustments can have on significantly changing behavior.

Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for a year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better when you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day for 1 year, you’ll decline nearly to zero. What starts out as a small win or minor setback accumulates into something much more. (1)

Why emphasize this? If you have the desire to control your inbox, it will be so much easier if you choose to drain your ocean of emails a little bit at a time.

A Modified One Percent

I’ve got two ways you can approach what James Clear notes as “the compound intertest of self-improvement”. It can be in either 45 or 90 days. However, you have got to commit to the time it will take to reduce the ocean of messages.

The 45-day method pushes you to seek a 1 percent improvement every third day and then accelerates to one percentage a day. It is aggressive but can yield tremendous results. Suppose you have 20K emails in your inbox and you average 100 emails a day. Day one, you’ll commit to cleaning up 201 old emails: (20,000 +100) X 1%. On day two, your emails will stand at 19,989 and you need to remove 199. However, on day four the reduction percentage jumps to 2. Now you need to clean up 390 emails. Yet, you’ll have three days to help you get into a rhythm. Should you follow the process, by day 45, you will have a clean inbox.

The 90-day process expands the 1 percentage improvement to every 8 days. For someone with 20,000 email in their inbox, that’s about 245 emails on average each day you be clearing out to maintain a message free inbox.

In chapter 5 of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, we find the following, “Twenty times a day some error in perception, or the optical illusions of some sailor perched in the crosstrees, would cause intolerable anguish, and this emotion, repeated twenty times over, kept us in a state of irritability so intense that a reaction was bound to follow.”

Using the modified one percent rule for your emails will keep you from multiple errors in perception, intolerable aguish of trying to find something, lowering your irritability, and improving your use of time.

In Part 2, we will discuss the process by which you can implement and continue to use one percent concepts in email management.

Featured Free Resource

Email Clean-up Plan Tool

To help you create your modified one percent plan, download the Email Clean-up Tool. It is part of the variety of free resources offered.

Download it

To help you create your modified one percent plan, download the Email Clean-up Tool. It is part of the variety of free resources offered.

David Buck is the author of the book The Time-Optimized Life, owner of Kairos (Time) Management Solutions, LLC. Learn how to apply the concepts of proactively planning and using your time. Take the Time Management Analysis (TMA), the Retirement Time Analysis (RTA), or all the other free resources offered to help bring more quality time into your life.

(1) James Clear, Atomic Habits, page 15

The post Twenty Thousand Leagues of Email: Part 1 first appeared on Infinity Lifestyle Design.

David Buck Time Strategist

In 35+ years of business development, David developed a strong awareness of what it took for people to be productive and efficient, not just busy. He also personally sought to gain a balance of having a successful career along with the ability to pursue a meaningful personal life.

That led David to start Kairos Management Solutions, focusing all his attention to guide business professionals who struggle with a lack of flexibility in their life to gain more quality personal time. David helps others craft a strategy around their current management of time, and then define a lifestyle of intention, ease, and joy.

In 2024, David released two books, the first being The Time Optimized Life. The book reframes the reactive nature of time management and replaces it with a proactive method of time optimization. In addition, he co-authored The Retirement Collective, where he highlights and provides solutions for how to maximize the use of time for people in post-career life.