Get Ready to Clean Out Your Inbox

It is that time of the year again, and no, I am not talking about the holiday season.  We just did that. Now we need to move on, get back to work and  on track for 2012.  As we think about being more productive and profitable this year, what better way to begin than by cleaning out your inbox. I don’t know about you, but I can’t see to the bottom of mine. No matter how hard I try, I never manage to clean it out completely.  I get just so far and then I am slammed with another couple dozen emails and off I go again.

An important message that I bring to those who attend my presentations or who read my articles on email etiquette in the business world is that you need to respond to email in a timely fashion.  You need to be in control of what comes in and what goes out of your mailbox. You need to understand that your business email is an extension of your professional  image.

There is hope and it is right around the corner. Two weeks from now, January 23-27, we recognize “Clean Out Your Inbox Week.”  How timely is that, especially if one of your New Year’s resolutions is to take control of your email. The person behind this event is my good friend Marsha Egan, the author of Inbox/Detox. Five years ago Marsha realized that almost everyone in the workplace is suffering from email overload and that productivity is affected by our email addiction so she started something akin to the Betty Ford Clinic for Email Addicts.

If you want to take back your work life, recover from your addiction and project the image of a polished professional online, I suggest you check out Marsha’s programs.   You might think about purchasing her best-selling book, Inbox Detox and the Habit of Email Excellence (Acanthus 2009), available on Amazon.

While I still haven’t been 100% successful in my efforts to clean out my inbox, each year when I go back into treatment, I get  better.  Who knows, this may be the year I succeed.