Cameron Herold shares a four-folder email system he's used for 25 years to hit inbox zero daily. Delete junk, handle quick messages immediately, delegate what's not yours, and file the rest. The whole process takes two minutes.
Chapters
You know, it so baffles me as to why we have not fixed for every one of our employees the system of not having any emails left in your inbox at the end of the day. I'm going to teach you this system right now in about 2 minutes so that you can actually get all of your employees completely caught up. Because if you're hearing people on your team, maybe on their leadership team, saying, oh, sorry, I missed that email, or that email got buried, or I forgot about that, it's because they have a crappy system. Now, when you're at your home, at your house, wherever you live, you go out to the mailbox and you come into the mail or into the kitchen, into the house with a stack of mail. I'm going to teach you how to deal with your email the same way that you deal with your actual physical mail. On the way back into the kitchen, you look for what the junk is and you quickly delete it. Same thing with your inbox, either you or an assistant delete, unsubscribe to all the junk, all the emails that you don't need to be getting. Number 2 is you actually deal with it right away. So maybe it's a quick You get a letter from somebody, you open it and you read it really quickly. Number 3 is you delegate it to somebody else. So maybe it's bills that your spouse pays, or maybe it's mail for one of your kids. You're going to delegate it to them. And then the last is you're going to drag it to a follow-up folder. The magazines you might put on a coffee table and maybe some casual mail that you can get to maybe once every couple of weeks, you might stack up in your kitchen. That's how you deal with the physical mail. You're going to deal with the same way with your inbox. You're going to have 4 folders. End of day, end of week, casual reading, and follow-up. And then you're going to delete anything you don't need. But by the end of the day, your inbox should be completely zero like mine is and has been for 25 years since I first learned this system. Anyway, I go into this system on email management in a lot more detail in my Invest in Your Leaders training. Go to investinyourleaders.com. That's investinyourleaders.com. Have all of your employees, or worst case scenario, anyone in your company that manages people, go through this skill as well as the other 11 skills that are in there. Investinyourleaders.com. We'll see you on the inside.
