Escaping the Email Vortex: Practical Advice for Getting Your Inbox to Zero

Photo credit: Ed Mitchell

Most working professionals  complain about the volume of email they receive each day.  What they don’t know is that they have their eyes on the wrong target, and instead should shift their attention to the time demands buried in electronic messages.

To explain, let’s start with a definition of a “time demand,” which is nothing more than a mental, individual commitment to accomplish a task in the future.  It’s a peculiar invention of the human imagination, and has some distinct characteristics.  A time demand is:

• created in the mind of the person making the commitment
• automatically