While there have been quite a few posts on various blogs about maintaining a Zero Inbox, or an Empty Inbox for email, I take the opposite tack and assert that an overflowing in-box of a sign of lack of productivity.
This is not meant as a value judgment or a moral conclusion.
Instead, it is meant to […]

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The email in-box is nothing more than a mouth.
Huh?
Well, the mouth is an ideal capture point. It allows for temporary storage of a certain amount of food, and performs its function perfectly as a “staging area” for the process of digestion, and sending essential nutrition to the rest of the body.
When food stays […]

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As
mentioned before, the task of comparing one worker to another in terms of their productivity has become much harder.
However, the results of examining their in-box can give a good insight into how productive they are. In other words, a person who has an in-box of thousands of items is less productive than one […]

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Back in the old days it was easy.
The unproductive guy was the one who still had a bunch of bricks sitting in a pile waiting to be assembled into a wall, while the productive guy was finished long before, and was onto the next task of digging the trench.
Productivity was easily measured by throughput […]

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One of the easiest ways to check whether or not someone is at a higher belt level is to observe carefully how they handle email.
What do they have in their in-box? Is the number of emails always kept small? Does email get sent to them that they never reply to? Does email routinely get […]

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One of the more difficult habits to break when using Outlook is hard to change because of how the program is designed.
Here is the typical scenario:

Several pieces of email come into the Outlook in-box
Each of them share a single characteristic, in that they require about ten minutes of work
They have nothing else in common

Here […]

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