Last time it was Wabi-Sabi – this time it’s Jugaad.

"What's a Jugaad," you ask? This is a Hindi word that means "an innovative fix" or a "repair derived from ingenuity." (Think a bicycle chain repaired with some duct tape.)

How does this apply to email? Let's pick up from last time…
 
Your Inbox needs an Intervention
 
In the last article, I tried to share some ways to help reduce the emails. Maybe they helped, maybe they didn't or maybe you didn’t even try. That’s okay. We have an innovative fix to give you more time working on your goals and less time spent on managing emails.
 
Realize though that so much time is wasted on emails:
  • Reading them
  • Re-reading them
  • Filing them
  • Deciding what to do with them
  • Doing nothing and coming back later 
We are simply overwhelmed by emails and the numbers show it:
  • 3.9 billion – Estimated numbers of email accounts by 2017
  • 6 percent – Annual growth rate of email accounts over the next four years
  • 207 billion – Estimated number of emails sent per day by 2017 
It's time to take control of those 207 billion emails and get back to achieving your goals.
 
The Jugaad of Inbox Hero

So how do we fix the email overload and get back to focusing on our goals and be successful? Unless your goal is simply read emails, you probably have some serious business goals to work on.
 
You need a plan to:
  • Get through your deluge of emails
  • Identify the important ones
  • Take actions to help you be successful 

We suggest a simple plan we call: "Inbox Hero."

To be an Inbox Hero, you only have to remember these four simple steps (4S):
  1. Start
  2. Share
  3. Save
  4. Shred 
What will this do for you?
 
The only purpose of our Inbox Hero is to help you improve your personal time management process to get all those emails out of your inbox so you can focus on the important stuff.
 
Easy to Remember – Powerful to Use

Just remember 4S and you can power through hundreds of emails in under 30 minutes and shred them out of your inbox:

START
  • If the email has an action for you to do like answer a simple yes/no question, do it as you read it. Don’t put it off until later.
  • If it is part of a larger project or you need time to act on it, add it to your to do list then shred that email.
  • Your goal is to touch it once and move on. You will save buckets of time by not looking at the same email more than once.
SHARE
  • If the email is directed to someone else, forward that email out of your inbox and tell the sender who is going to take over.
  • If you are only part of a group of people copied on one big email blast, read it and get rid of it. Ask to be taken off the conversation if it doesn’t apply to you or hide the conversation if the sender doesn’t remove you.
SAVE
  • Save only those emails that have information you can't find someplace else. Most of the time, internal company emails refer to places and information that is saved somewhere else like SharePoint or Google Docs.
  • Your inbox is not an encyclopedia. Don’t worry about saving every single email.
  • Do save emails that have information not found in other places: like personal conversations, decisions and agreements for legal and human resources.
SHRED
  • The most powerful of the 4S: delete the emails!
  • Stop wasting time filing emails into folders when you can get rid of it. If you don’t have to save it, then don’t.
  • Set up rules to move or delete those newsletters, spam and other time wasters right out of your inbox.

Try Something – Everyone has a Different Style

Hopefully, you give some of these a try and see how they best fit into your personal time management process. Even if you save yourself 10 minutes a day not being overwhelmed by your inbox, that’s over 14 hours to get a real business goal achieved. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to time management.
 
We hope these ideas give you time back to achieve your goals!