What’s this?

An email about emails?

The irony isn’t lost on me. But if your inbox is always running the show and you’d like to get on top of it, this is one email you’ll want to pay close attention to. 

Here are some Zen-like thoughts for your inbox at work:

*** Your inbox doesn’t create your mood. Your mood creates your inbox

*** Your inbox will ALWAYS be full and there will ALWAYS be another email to reply to. If you spend your time fighting these two basic facts of corporate life, you’ll be fighting for the rest of your career. The question isn’t how to empty your inbox. The question is how to stop losing sleep over the fact that you never will

*** Your emails are not the problem. Your thinking about them might be. As Hamlet (Prince of the Inbox) once said: no email is good nor bad but thinking makes it so

*** Urgency doesn’t exist in the real world. It only exists in your mind and the minds of your colleagues

*** You cannot pass or fail your inbox

*** The more seriously you take an email, the more serious that email becomes

*** Emails are invitations, not obligations. Just because someone is asking you to take on their problem doesn’t mean you need to

*** Don’t prioritise emails based on how you feel about them. Responding to an email so you feel less anxious, more in control or so you can take something off your plate is conflating relief for getting the right thing done. You don’t need to deal with your emails to find relief. You can find relief right here, right now without anything changing in your inbox

*** You are not your inbox and your inbox is not your job

*** Nothing in your inbox has the power to make you feel anything. A noisy inbox doesn’t have to feel noisy and a frenetic inbox doesn’t have to feel frenetic. Those feelings are coming from you, not your inbox

*** Not responding to an email is still a response

I’d like to think that in a monastery somewhere in Tibet, a Zen master is sipping a cup of green tea while reading this email and nodding along sagely. And even though his inbox has 47,000 unread emails, he sleeps just fine.

But you don’t need to move to a Tibetan monastery to stop losing sleep over your emails.

You don’t even need to change a single email.

My coaching is a way to find peace, calm and clarity at work without changing anything about your job.

If you’d like to find out more, all the details are here:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

To fulfilment,

Tom