Too many emails can bog you down, so rather than being overwhelmed by the unread messages in your inbox, take charge. Entrepreneur Bryan Lee uses his previous experience as a firefighter and a popular productivity tool to make a system to sort his emails.


In emergencies, firefighters use different color-coded labels to tag patients to determine their priority. With your inbox, Lee uses these colors and the Eisenhower matrix of productivity to divide messages into four colors, as shown above. Go through all the unread or unaddressed messages in your inbox and start labelling them with one of those four colors.

Dwight Eisenhower's Best Productivity Tricks President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president and a five star general during World War II.… Read more


The advantage of this system is that you can use the firefighters' codes to know the action to take with each label:

Red (urgent and important): Do it now

Yellow (important, not urgent): Decide when to do it

Green (urgent, not important): Delegate it

Grey (not urgent, not important): Dump it

With this system in place, you should be better equipped to deal with email overload. Check out the full post below for some email management tools that Lee recommends.

Handle Your Email Like a Ninja Warrior | Tutum