Many users will no doubt have some difficulty following these suggestions, given the current state of their inboxes. Cleaning out a few spam e-mails is easy enough, but what if there are hundreds of FYIs and action items already in the inbox that have sat there for months?

The only solution is a total cleanout of the inbox, allowing the user start afresh with a message count of zero. This first-time emptying can be an intimidating task, especially for users with years of old messages moldering away. But it’s the only solution that gets users “on track” for the method described above. A more gradual approach may seem more attractive (“I’ll just clean it out a little bit each day, and soon it will be empty”), but it’s unlikely to work for users who have grown accustomed to a high message count since the constant receipt of new messages will only add to the message count. If you only clean a little out each day, you will never reach zero.

As harsh as the “cold turkey” approach may sound, the first-time emptying of an inbox is well within the reach of any user. After all, the method doesn’t ask users to do all the work in the inbox; rather, it simply asks that they get the information where it belongs: tasks and to-do’s on the task list, meetings on the calendar, and so on. An inbox with hundreds of messages can be cleaned out in this way in an hour or two of focused work; thereafter, the inbox can be cleaned daily with a few minutes’ work.