LeanMail is a highly efficient email management method designed to streamline your inbox and increase productivity, regardless of the volume of emails you receive. While many email management systems are geared towards individuals with high email volumes, LeanMail offers numerous benefits even for those who receive only a few emails per day. From reducing clutter to optimizing your workflow, LeanMail's innovative approach to email management will help you maximize your email efficiency and take control of your inbox.

Here are just seven of the most important benefits for those receiving fewer than 20 emails per day.

1. Improved email management skills: The LeanMail method helps to improve email management skills, regardless of the number of emails received.
2. Increased efficiency: It streamlines the email process and reduces the time spent on email, allowing for more time to focus on other tasks.
3. Improved focus and productivity: By prioritizing and processing emails efficiently, you can...

For many, managing an inbox is an agonizing Sisyphean task - or at least unpleasant and inefficient. But really, it's quite simple, and can be enormously efficient if you embrace three important concepts.

Before we get to those concepts, however, let's understand why you might reject the thesis that managing email could be simple. Nearly anyone reading this would immediately react with: Maybe for you, but you have no idea about the complexity and sheer number of emails I receive.  

And I would say, Ah, but after 15 years devoted to understanding email management as seen from those on the front lines of battle, and having worked with thousands of users form every company size and vertical imaginable, I have the qualifications to say, I do understand your situation.

Here's the thing, I agree that your work (decision making) may be complex: i.e. competing priorities and urgencies, intricate dependencies, never mind the strategic ways to request or submit responses is indeed...

Should Inbox Zero Be Your Goal? Probably Not.

Most of the blogs I read about being more productive with email focus on reaching inbox zero. No doubt, it’s a worthy cause, but is it the correct objective for you? Probably not.

Most people struggle with keeping their head above water, never mind capturing the holy grail of inbox management; and what does inbox zero really mean anyway? No emails in your inbox at all? Then what do you do with those mails that you simply can’t answer because you are waiting on someone else for a response? I think most of the zero pushers would say, Convert them into tasks or calendar items. What they mean by that is to go through an amazing amount of arduously administrative dragging, dropping and labeling acrobatics in order for you to proclaim, YES! INBOX ZERO! Honestly, I find that display of compulsivity to be beyond that of my Dutch aunt who used to clean her kitchen cupboards every single week. (Yes, she took out every pasta box, can,...

3 things you can do with an email that not everyone knows about:

1) Create a calendar event
Drag the email to your calendar icon in the lower left-hand side of Outlook. This will allow you to block out time to execute the task in the email. Use this when an email requires 30 minutes or more of your time. If the email has an attachment, copy that first, and paste it in the calendar item once you have created it.

2) Create a contact from an email
Drag the email to your contacts icon in the lower left-hand side of Outlook. This will create a contact with the information.

3) To create a task from an email
Drag the email to your task icon in the lower left-hand side of Outlook. This will create a task using the subject line of the email. If the email has an attachment, copy that first, and paste it in the calendar item once you have created it.

Here is a link to find out more about LeanMail and to register for our Free LeanMail introductory workshop.

Michael Hoffman

Probably the biggest challenge novice LeanMailers face is writing proper Next Actions (NAs) that make an impact on your brain. When your NAs are generic, your brain struggles to remember what the NAs pertained to. The result, then, is an increase in time-spend, not a decrease — without any return on investment

The reason

Generic NAs don’t hook into your memory, which means that you spend time writing them without receiving time-savings in return. Good intentions going in, but pure rubbish going out.

This is easily solved by getting a better understanding of, and putting more focus on, the WHAT of your NAs. (Remember that a NA is made up of a Who – What combination.

Words like: action, apply, read, follow up, (verbs in general) are not hooks that snag your memory. You need Whats, which are typcially nouns.

Are you saying that we can’t use verbs 

It’s not that you can’t...