How to cope with 20,000+ emails in your inbox

Ian Somerhalder came back from holiday to 20,740 emails. So we asked productivity expert Graham Allcott for some tips for when you feel you've lost control of your inbox.

Earlier this week, Lost and Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder returned from his holidays and tweeted a depressing screenshot to illustrate the dread of the email pile-up that awaited him as he got back to work. It's a common anxiety felt by many office workers: the scale of email overload somehow coming to make the whole idea of holidays feel almost futile. But it doesn't need to be this way. GQ asked Graham Allcott, author of How To Be A Productivity Ninja how to deal with and avoid the dreaded email overload.

1. Store emails that require an action somewhere else
The thing that makes an inbox stressful is that the stuff you need to reply to is mixed in amongst a big pile of emails that you only need to read, or can file away or delete. It can be scary knowing that as more emails are added to the pile, the important stuff you need to remember is lost below all the new stuff.  So keep "action" emails in a separate folder - that way you can more quickly start to build up a picture of what actual work there is to do.

2. Ninja-Hacking
When you have hundreds or even thousands of emails, the chances are very few of them will need an action or reply (in fact, forget the 80-20 rule: the 800-20 rule is more applicable to email!). "Hack" away (delete or file) whole groups of emails in one go. Viewing your whole inbox by "subject" or by "from" are great ways to see patterns and you can hack accordingly - date view is email's default but also the least efficient.

3. Set your out of office message a day later
If you're coming back to work on the Monday, word your out of office message so that people don't expect to hear from you until the Tuesday - giving yourself that extra day to get back under control.

4. Keep your inbox at zero
Once you get your inbox to zero, it's remarkably easy to keep it there, because you get into the habit of reaching zero before you log off and of course, you never see thousands of old emails in your inbox so you're motivated to keep it down. Getting to zero isn't as hard as you think. Three or four hours of ruthless hacking (with the ability for new emails to come in whilst you're hacking turned off if possible) should usually suffice. Make the delete key your friend and it's easier to achieve than you think.

5. Live outside your inbox
Email dominates working life, but it's just another medium, not the message. So encourage yourself to use the phone, talk face to face and occasionally turn email off altogether! Email isn't always the most efficient tool. Real change happens outside of the email inbox, and rather counter-intuitively, the less you check email (for example, once a day instead of every ten minutes), the less time it takes to deal with what's there - strange but always true!

Originally published on GQ.co.uk in April 2014. Read the original post here.