In a world where knowledge workers may receive 300 emails a day, and have thousands of unread messages in their inbox, one of the best pieces of advice I can give them in my workshops may be

Be quick with that Delete button!

Unfortunately, people are so loath to heed this advice, that I often don’t even try.

What’s keeping them from deleting with a vengeance it the mortifying fear that they will accidentally delete an important message. Oh, the horror!…

The implicit assumption

There may be two underlying assumptions at play here: one assumes deleting the message harms its sender; the other, its recipient.

• In the first case, the assumption is that it is the duty of the recipient to read any message sent their way. The sender merely launches the message; the recipient bears the burden of reading it. Which is curious, when you consider that it is the sender who is intruding, uninvited, into the recipient’s life – and, specifically, into their list of priorities.In this model, if you send me a message and I delete it unread, I have sinned before you. What right have I to go about my life and my work instead of dropping everything to read your missive? How selfish is that? How will I be able to face your just wrath?
• The second case is harder to overcome: it assumes that if I delete a message without perusing its content, I may end up in trouble because the deleted message may have been important to myself. This actually makes some sense: what if the message is telling me that I won the lottery? Or that the house is on fire?

Putting the problem in context

Just because an argument has a point doesn’t mean it should be accepted: it makes sense to brush your teeth daily, but not when a hurricane is approaching your home. Everything depends on the context!

Here is the context of the email deletion problem:

Many of us are receiving so much email that we can never read it all, and it’s overwhelming our ability to do our work (and to lead a sane life).

In this context, I sometimes go so far as to say that if we had a bot program on the server that deleted 50% of incoming mail completely at random, we’d still be better off than we are today. In this extreme scenario we definitely would lose a few important messages; it’s just that with 300 a day we are missing important ones anyway because we’re too distracted to even see them! Meanwhile, the benefit of becoming sane again, of being able to actually focus on creative work, would offset any harm done by this bot.

In other words, your willingness to delete a mail after only the most cursory glance at its subject should be assessed in the context of the current situation, which is probably disastrous.

So, what if you miss an important message?

Let’s take on that fear head on. You’ve received an important email and you’ve deleted it accidentally. What’s going to happen?

Actually, not much.

If the message is truly urgent – the house really is on fire – you can bet someone will pick up the phone and call or text or IM you. We are so accessible these days that the sender will make sure to reach you by another channel (if they had sense, they wouldn’t have chosen email for this in the first place).

If the message is important but not urgent, the sender will resend it, or call you, a couple of days later. Regrettable, but hardly a disaster.

If the sender complains, you can always diplomatically hint that the message must’ve gone unnoticed in the flood – many do, so this is quite credible.

The curse of ignorance phobia

I once wrote about this manager I was interviewing about his email load. We were looking at a message in his Inbox, and the guy told me it arrives from corporate HQ every week. When I pressed for details I was told that the man never read it, not once. Why not get off the distribution, then, I asked – and the indignant reply was “You want me to lose important information?!”

In this case, the message is not personally addressed to this person; it’s just an FYI. And yet he’s terrified to lose it, even while he’s overloaded with more important stuff. This irrational behavior merits a Greek name ending with “phobia”, indicating a fear of not knowing. It is a destructive condition indeed: by mucking in such “important information” the manager was wasting time and productivity, and ultimately stockholder value.

Here’s my advice if you have this disease: buy an excellent book in your field of work, one renowned around the world, one you’d never have time to read. Now delete the messages and promise yourself that if you ever have the time to read such messages, you’ll read the book instead. It’s sure to be better, right?

A reality call

Naturally, nobody is proposing to install that random-deletion bot, nor am I advising you to delete messages without at least a glance to identify their nature. Fortunately, you don’t need such measures: there is an impressive crop of software tools that will take the glance for you, and classify the messages into Urgent, Worth reading later, and Trash. You can use the native features of Outlook and Gmail; for better classifiers, take a look at the Solution Guide for a comprehensive listing of the many amazing tools out there.

Between such classifiers, your common sense, and the realization that doing nothing is sure to be worse, you may beat the fear of deleting and recover your life!