There’s a wonderful story that I loved to read to my boys when they were young: There’s A Monster Under My Bed by James Howe. It’s speaks playfully but powerfully to that irrational fear of the dark that so many of us struggled with. And, of course, most of us came to realize that the monster existed only in our imaginations.

But there’s another monster that lurks for many of us. It’s called our email inbox. And it’s real!

I shared my Time Mastery training workshop recently in NYC. The CEO of the company admitted to me he had thousands of emails in his inbox, many of them unread!

Talk about lions and tiger and bears. Oh my!

All of us are inundated with emails every single day. And for many, the inbox becomes a vast wasteland of garbage and chaos.

It’s time to manage the monster.

Start by applying what I call The Three Ds: Do. Delegate. Delete.

• By Do, I mean respond in that moment to the email; or if it requires no response and is important as a record, file it in an appropriate folder, moving it from your Inbox.

• Delegate means forwarding it, in that moment, to your assistant or colleague together with appropriate instructions to be handled by that other person.

• Delete means getting rid of it. Right then.

By the way, take the time, in the first instance, to unsubscribe to unwanted emails or mark them as spam (of course, the exception to this would be emails from me). And set appropriate filters to segregate emails for easier review. (Gmail is especially useful for this practice.)

Ok, you say… but I’m that CEO with 2000 unanswered emails in my Inbox. I’m drowning. Tell me how to start!

Declare email amnesty. Set up a file folder called Old Inbox. Move your entire Inbox to that folder. And start again.

This way, you can begin anew with these more powerful practices. If something crops up from an old email, you’ll be able to find it. The likelihood is that you’ll discover that the Old Inbox is kinda like that shabby cardboard box that’s been sitting in the back of your garage for the last 6 years… good for not much of anything. (But, of course, if you’re in a profession like law or medicine or financial services, you probably shouldn’t just chuck it.)

When I was a student at Cornell Law School, there was a grand old movie, based on a book, about legal education called The Paper Chase. Indeed, when I first started practice, it was all about the paper. Email, and its attendant technologies, was supposed to cure us of that. But alas, we’ve been left with a monster.

But it can be tamed.

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By the way, here’s a short video I recorded on the topic for The Connecticut Bar Association that you might enjoy: