I was working with a CEO who had over 20,000 unread emails in his inbox.
Not an exaggeration. 20,000.
He had been carrying them for years. Every time he thought about dealing with them, the overwhelm stopped him before he started. What if something important was buried in there? What if he missed something? The inbox had become a symbol of everything that was slipping. Opening it created anxiety. Closing it created guilt.
We sat down and worked through it together.
The functional part was straightforward. There are really only two types of emails in any inbox. The ones specifically for you, directly related to the work in front of you. And everything else. Newsletters, broadcasts, things copied to the whole team, updates never asked for. The second category, no matter how old, can be archived or deleted. It is not loss. It is clarity.
Even the emails that were specifically for him but months old, the initiatives behind them had already moved forward or been handled by others. Those could be archived too.
But the harder work was not the inbox. It was the resistance.
This was a detail-oriented executive who had spent years treating everything as potentially important. Deleting an email felt like closing a door. We had to work through that together. The fear. The FOMO. The sense that letting go meant losing something.
After about 90 minutes, working through it alongside each other, he had 19 emails left.
19 emails, all specifically for him, all relevant to the work in front of him right now.
He spent about 30 minutes reading them and composing his replies. And for the first time in years, his inbox reflected reality instead of everything he had been avoiding. Business was moving again.
That is what working alongside someone makes possible.
Not doing the work for you. Being there with you when the work gets hard. That changes everything.