Now I want to talk about how to do triage on your inbox. triage is a phrase that comes from the medical profession, and has to do with large amounts of casualties, people hurt coming in at once. And you have to say, Oh, this person will die if they don't get immediate surgery, their top priority, this person is hurting, but is stable and can wait for an hour or two until until something else is open that we can help them with. So you're going to sort these people into those categories. Similarly, we're going to do that with email, we're going to sort it into is a top priority does have to be dealt with Now, what's the best way to deal with it, and we're going to work from the folders we created in the last lesson for the now. Next, pending reading and archive folders.

Now in future you're only going to work from the folders instead of your inbox. So the inbox is something you only are going to use for sorting. So let's look at the process. So the triage process first off, one of the best things to do is delete the junk first. So if you are regularly getting junk that doesn't need to be there, let's get rid of it all. One simple way to get all together is if you sort all your email by either the source the email it's from, or the subject line, you'll probably get if you're getting a lot of junk from the same place, it'll probably get all together and you can delete it like a page at a time, hundreds at a time instead of having to go through and do them individually.

So that's a great way to get rid of it first. Now, it's also very important during the triage process, don't answer any emails, not you're not answering, this is not the place to answer emails, you are really just sorting, you're just moving them all to the appropriate folder. Okay? You don't want to answer any of them. You don't want to agonize over this. Don't make it too complicated.

Just make a snap decision for the most part. You don't even want To open an email, you just want to sort it by who it's from and the subject line, just drag it into the folders. And you'll find even if you've got a lot of emails in your inbox, you'll find that this won't take long the first time it will take longer, but daily it will actually be very fast. So go ahead, do this. Now. move all of your emails into these folders, and then come back and we'll go on to the next lesson.