How I Tamed My Inbox

I describe my Inbox Zero maintenance program at http://freedomfromorganization.com.

It sounds like there’s no clear differentiation between supporting project materials and actionable “later” emails that you haven’t yet input into Things.

Whenever an email requires an action, I hit ‘s’ for star, and then go through my starred items regularly and input them into my project management system (pen and paper … haven’t met a software program that’s worked for me yet, and I’m a strong believer that your process has to be there first, and then a program may or may not be available to fit that process). Once the action has been captured, I un-star (but it maintains the project label throughout).

It also might be easier to name your labels after the project name and not the area. This makes it really easy to find only exactly what you’re looking for on a given project. The point of Contexts is that there are some things you can only do in a certain environment (run an errand, make a phone call), and you can do any of your categories in any environment (presumably). If category is important for you to note, you could color all projects under Family light brown, etc.

You also simply must start using the GMail Macros Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you’re not. With the number of emails I’m sure you have each day, an extra keyboard shortcut or two would save you significant time.

Don’t beat yourself up over the “don’t check email too many times per day” idea. That may be fine for people whose livelihoods don’t depend on the Internet, but it’s damn irresponsible to check email once or twice a day when your career is web-based. The key is not to *dwell* in your Inbox all day — you want to hit a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and be in and out in a minute or two.

Hi Chris, great post. I have been trying to stay at inbox zero ever since the Merlin Mann Google presentation (re) circulated twitter a month or so ago. It’s been going well so far (for my personal email atleast!)

I use Google Calendar to process emails that are date sensitive, either reminders or events/meetings. With G Cal, if the date is formatted properly, you can add the event straight from the email.

I also use Remember the Milk for storing to-do’s by context. There is a method for keeping RTM in the sidebar for Firefox here so it is always available.

I get way too many emails from work to try this yet. Perhpas if I can stick to this discipline for personal email, I can apply it to work…eventually.

Smashing tip mate. And considering that i get about an infinitesimal amount of email a day let alone on the hour this is quit helpful. Now only if we can do this with our free yahoo and hotmail accounts too. But on second hand, that’s why we all have switch to google anyways.

Well articulated…thanks for the post and it’s a big help. A few years ago a team of us tried the extreme approach – we erased every email that came in for one week without looking at it as a test. We then tested to see how much fell through the cracks. In the end, there were about 5 important things that fell through the cracks but since we received phone calls about those issues we were able to handle anyway. Now, I don’t suggest this approach for a whole host of reasons and we haven’t done anything like it since – rather I just point it out because….you must be very diligent in asking “is this important/do I need to respond/do I need to be copied on all of this/etc…”. Organization of email is great and this post help immensely with that, but it’s also important to cut down on the amount of incoming email in the first place.

Chris, I already take your RSS feed, and benefit from it. I’ve just twittered this to some colleagues who are crumbling under the wieght of their inboxes. Seeing your mail on one page really makes a difference.

Hi, Chris,

I like your e-mail system. If you’d like to add a powerful tweak, check out the book “Do It Tomorrow” by Mark Forster. Mark advocates scanning your e-mail several times, but only to take action on things that REQUIRE immediate response. Everything else, you defer dealing until tomorrow. Tomorrow, you limit your action time to processing the (fixed size) inbox from yesterday. Each day you get the experience of emptying your inbox and completing your TO DO list. It’s very powerful!

Best wishes,

Stever Robbins
host of The Get-It-Done Guy

Wow. Gush gush. Stever commented on my post??? (honestly, I’m a big fan, and you need to be, too.)

Check out http://diggreponsitory.blogspot.com/2007/12/spammers-penetrate-gmail-spam-filters.html – Gmail is still liable for spam attacks unless you do a little patchwork with filters and labels to remove spam. GMail still hasn’t rectified the problem, but you can fix it yourself with a little elbow grease.

I like this! I’m constantly trying to keep the inbox down. When it’s at or below 5 I feel free and creative. Thanks for the ideas!!

Dang, Brogan. I’m just as overwhelmed by this post as I am with my inbox but I like what your saying. I think I need to keep reading it over and over and eventually I will have the strength to put it to use. :)

@Sarah – You’ll get there. Baby steps. Read Stever’s idea and the other people in the comments. They have even easier methods. : )

OMG!!! I did it!!! Thank you, Chris Brogan! You have saved my inbox! I can breathe now…

By the way, Casey McKinnon put a Flickr screencap of her empty inbox with a link to this post. That link got me 40 new reads of the post. That’s just something to consider when you’re posting to Flickr. Another source of traffic.

There seems to be a step missing in your description. I don’t really understand how you get from categorizing email (which I do already) to what is shown in the image. Gmail puts every mail I have ever received into my inbox, even if I have read it and tagged it with labels. Is this picture meant to indicate that you have deleted all your email – if so, how can you refer back to it? I thought the point of gmail is that it keeps everything and makes it searchable.

In other, traditional, email clients, I can move stuff from the inbox to folders to get it out of my face, but gmail does not seem to support that way of working. I can’t even find a way of displaying only un-labelled conversations (which would seem to be the equivalent of a traditional inbox).

Or have I missed something obvious? Baffled.

And looking at my Flickr stats on the screencap of my empty inbox (which has currently been seen 350 times):

32% of traffic came from Pownce
24% of traffic came from Flickr
14% of traffic came from Twitter

Another thing to consider ;)

Hi Frank–

I don’t use folders. I pile all the mail in an archive, because if there was data I really needed to complete a task or to know something, I move that into Things. The mail just stays in an archive.

The point is to make the mail app NOT be where you think about things. It’s where you receive info, and then do something with the info. Save the mail for reference, just in case, but otherwise, you DO stuff elsewhere.

Make sense?

Chris, as an occasional correspondent, my suggestion would be to add a keyword or two that you tell people about and use Gmail’s filters to file them. So for me, you can add “crackpot” and I’ll send my ideas to you with that word in the subject. All my ideas will be filed under “crackpot”. Perfect, no?

Sneakemail.com has the advantage that each address can be turned off or deleted if you find yourself spammed to death. I use Sneakemail for all forms and memberships, at least until I’m sure the company won’t sell my email into spam slavery.

/r

Thanks Chris.

I have experimented a bit more, and I think I have found my problem. I was misunderstanding what “archive” meant. In GMail, it seems that “archive” just means “do not show in inbox”. This is very different from what (for example) Outlook means by “archive”. Having been very frustrated by Outlook’s approach to archiving (which makes archived email much harder to access) in the past, I had never clicked that button in GMail.

A clarification of your article might be to elaborate on your section on processing incoming mail. How/when do you archive your email. Do you have a rule which archives everytyhing automatically to keep your inbox empty? Do you do it manually after you have labelled an email as “Family/Home”, “Blogging” etc.? Do you use some other approach? I found it puzzling that you include the archive button in “You’ll Need”, but then never mention it again.

As an aside, what do you do about incoming email which does not have an obvious associated action – such as discussion mailing lists, automated status updates or subscriber newsletters?

“As an aside, what do you do about incoming email which does not have an obvious associated action – such as discussion mailing lists, automated status updates or subscriber newsletters?”

What I do is filter them by server of origin and file by subject. Looking at Gmail “folders” you’ll see the number of undread messages, and you’ll look when you’re in the mood to read about each interest, e.g., design, aero, exercise or Cubs.

/r

heh, “undread” messages! I meant “unread”, but non-spam which is often called “ham” could be in the “undread” category :)

You aren’t that specific about how you transfer the messages and “mail” tasks to Things if you use Gmail. If you use mail, I know you can drag the message into a context or project, but how do you integrate gmail into the fold with Things?

Thanks for the post. A couple of other points to consider to not to give out your primary email address to everyone. And if you work for a company ask management to constantly remind everyone not to “Send to all” unless it’s truly necessary.