Do you read all your email?

I have a question for you today that’s really an entrance point into a topic that’s very important when it comes to reaching your goals in the most efficient way. That question is: Do you read all your email?

It seems that the answer to this tends toward the extremes. You look at someone’s phone, and you see that little envelope, and you see the little bubble of how many unread messages are there…On one hand you have the people that want to clear the bubbles out as soon as they appear so that every last thing is organized.  I tend toward that.

But then there’s the other person. When you look at their phone, you see tons of bubbles! You see the mail icon with 30,000 unread emails! If you are more of the first type, there’s something inside you that kind of freaks out a little bit! Right?

We definitely have tendencies toward one or the other. There’s the person who wants to know everything that’s going on, who wants everything to be organized, wants everything to be in its place. And then there’s the person who, once everything starts piling up, finds it easier to ignore it. I think we all tend toward one or the other. However, whatever end of the spectrum you might find yourself on or leaning toward, there’s really one thing we need to do to become more effective. That is to learn discernment.

If you can stay up with all the things that are going on – numbers of emails included, especially in today’s world – then you probably aren’t thinking big enough. If you’re out there, working to achieve goals, living a full life with friends and family and work, then you’re probably not able to keep up. Your life is full, and you don’t have time to read 10,000 emails a day. With that being said, how do we manage this? We can try to keep on top of them, but we’ll be giving up time toward something else to do that. Or we could ignore them, but we might be missing things that are important.

What we need to do is to keep our central focus. What IS important to you? What ARE you looking for? If you keep those two things in mind, you can easily clean out swaths of email. I definitely used to try to keep on top of things. I used to want to know all the details that I could, but it got to the point that there’s too much to know for the things I’m trying to do in my life, and there’s no way I can know everything. So instead, I know what’s important to me.

For example, while eating healthy is an important goal for me, maybe that’s not my focus right now. I’m on plenty of email lists about eating healthy and nutrition, but if right now is not a time I’m focused on that, I don’t need to read those emails. I see the subject and I delete them. On the other hand, if I’ve been interested in taking a language class and I see something in my email that’s about that – those are the things I’ll focus on reading.

It seems pretty simple, but I really want you to think about how you’re using discernment in managing your time and managing your life, so you can devote more resources toward the things that matter to you.

I definitely fall into the trap sometimes of keeping things I “might want to do one day.” Instead, now I trust that when the time comes that it’s important to me again, an opportunity will show up, and I don’t need to keep 100 emails “just in case.”

How can more discernment help you streamline your path to your goals? Maybe it does apply to how you approach your email. But maybe it also applies in other ways you are allocating your time and your resources.