Cameron Herold teaches a system to hit inbox zero using the four Ds: Delete, Delegate, Deal, or Drag-to-folder. Sort emails into End of Day, End of Week, Casual Reading, and Follow Up folders, then triage daily. Starbucks and his coaching clients use it.
Chapters
Have you ever had that kind of nagging feeling like, oh, shit, there was an email that I got. I can't remember what it was or who it was from, but I know I didn't get back to them. Or people are constantly saying to you, you know, why haven't you gotten back to them? You know, or you're just sitting with an inbox with like, you know, 1200 or 1800 or 7000 or even 50 emails in it. My inbox today has four. And it's a lesson that I learned from the My mentor, who is being groomed, is the second in command at Starbucks. It's a system that I've used for email now for about 15 years. We taught everyone at 18 Thunder God Junk. I teach all of my coaching clients. In fact, one of my coaching clients, Bobby, the CEO of Blue Brace Logistics, they raised about $255 million about three years ago. I've been coaching them for seven years when I was coaching Bobby, and I taught Bobby this system, he said, oh my God, this is going to change our business. He had 400 employees at the time. I said, yeah, but the point isn't for you only to learn this system. Imagine if all of your employees were better at their email as well. So here's how I manage my email. First off, think about your mailbox at your house. Does your mailbox from your house have all of your mail sitting there from the last year? Of course not. Every day you go to the mailbox and you take all of the mail at once. You probably walk towards the kitchen and on the way to the kitchen, you quickly sort through it and you take all the junk mail and you delete it right away. The second thing you do is you take a look at the mail and you look at where are the bills, probably put them in a stack and you deal with those later. And then you see any of the mail that's for your wife or your kids, and you probably place those aside for them, so you're kind of delegating it to them. And then the last bit of mail that you look at for yourself, you might take a look at and you might read it right, right on the spot. Or it's magazines, and you stack those up and usually put them on the coffee table somewhere and you get to those later. It's the same system that you use for handling mail that you now are going to be using for handling your email. So basically, you start off with the four Ds. The four Ds are delete, delegate, deal, with or drag to a folder. And the folders that you drag the emails to are end of day, end of week, casual reading and follow up. That's it. Other than that, you have folders for projects that you're working on, but those are emails that you've already read, emails that you've already dealt with and they're just place placed into that folder. But your inbox at the end of every day is zero. So the easiest way again to deal with this is either you or an assistant to triage all of your email once or twice a day, where once or twice a day you look at everything in your inbox and again you either delete it, deal with it, delegate it to somebody else, or drag it to the end of day, end of week or casual reading or follow up folder. End of day you only look at after 4 o', clock, end of week you only look at on Thursday or Friday. The casual reading you might look at once a quarter. And the follow up are just emails that you're going to drag there to remind yourself to follow up those people at a later date. That's it. Simple system, really really easy way to actually get through everything. And if the leadership team at Starbucks that gets 300 to 600 emails per day because of all the CCS, blind CCS groups, etc. That they're in, if that system works so that the executive team at Starbucks has inbox zero, it'll really work for your business as well.
