How I Achieve Inbox Zero Every Day (and you can too!)
I occasionally see posts on Facebook where people compare their inboxes.
“I have 12,000 emails in my inbox! I don’t think I’ll ever read them all.”
“It’s impossible to keep up with my inbox, so I don’t even try.”
A full inbox becomes a mental weight. It’s something you don’t even want to look at. You’ll miss important emails or opportunities, and even if you see them, your turnaround time will suffer.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Just about every day I achieve “Inbox Zero” (no emails in any of my inboxes) by following four simple rules.
- Unsubscribe Relentlessly
- Use Keyboard Shortcuts or Gestures
- Snooze Important Emails
- Use a To-Do App
- At the end of the day, snooze the rest
But First — Start Fresh By Declaring Email Bankruptcy
Before we get into the rules, start by cleaning out your existing inbox. Pick a point (say, anything older than a month), tag them with “bankrupt-emails”, and then archive them. They’ll still be around and easily accessible should you ever need to go look at them. But they won’t be clogging up your mental space.
Here’s an example search for use within Gmail search: before:2016/11/1 Once you’ve searched, select all the emails (make sure to “select all conversations”) and then click “More”, apply the label, then archive.
Other mail apps will have similar functionality, so adapt to your needs.
Now, onto the four rules for daily Inbox Zero!
1. Unsubscribe relentlessly
Even after archiving things older than a month, much of your inbox is probably still taken up with newsletters or notifications for things that you really don’t read. And most of those include an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Click it! After just a few days of unsubscribes your incoming email volume will reduce drastically, guaranteed.
If the email doesn’t include a functioning unsubscribe, use the “block” feature or “report spam” to get rid of them forever.
“But what if I miss something important!” I believe (strongly!) that your inbox shouldn’t be your news aggregator. Use Twitter or RSS clients to follow your favorite news sources and only check when you’re not busy. If you must use email, create a different email address and inbox just for newsletter subscriptions, and only check that once a day at most.
I’ve found that once I started unsubscribing, there was almost a gleeful feeling in clicking that button. See ya! You too! Gone! Away with thee!
This really is the most important rule for a clean inbox. Unsubscribe relentlessly!
2. Use keyboard shortcuts or gestures
Archiving or deleting should be super easy. When I click into an email, I just tap E to archive or Shift+3 to delete (Gmail standard shortcuts — you might have to enable them in Settings). It makes going through simple notification emails much faster.
Your email app probably has keyboard shortcuts or gestures. If not, you need a better email app!
Making deletes or archives easy will mean that you will do it more consistently. Learn the shortcuts and use them.
3. You snooze, you win
Every so often, there’s an email that warrants your attention, but you don’t have time to deal with it right now. In those cases, snooze is your best friend.
There are several email apps that support snooze out of the box. Unfortunately, Gmail isn’t one of them. You can use Gmail Snooze for Google Chrome or Streak CRM to add snooze functionality to Gmail, or just switch to Inbox which has it built-in already.
EDIT: Gmail now supports snooze and Inbox is no more. RIP.
In addition to snoozing an email, I usually also create a calendar event so I’ve reserved time to work on the email once it pops up in my nicely sparse inbox. Now I can forget about that email/task until it’s time to work on it.
4. Turn emails into to-do items
If you prefer not to use your email as a to-do list, a great alternative is to use a real to-do app like Todoist, OmniFocus, Wunderlist, or even just plain old pen and paper. Just create a to-do item and archive the email.
I’ve had mixed results with to-do apps over the years, so I tend to use my email inbox as a to-do list. I’ll even send myself an email to create a new to-do. But many of my team at Infinite Red use to-do apps very effectively.
5. At the end of the day, snooze the rest
This sounds like a joke, I know. But when you run out of time, just do a “mini-bankruptcy” and select-all, snooze until the morning.
“Why not leave them in my inbox?” you may ask. If you’re anything like me, I sometimes accidentally or habitually jump over to my inbox even when I’m done for the day, and seeing “inbox zero” gives me more peace of mind. It might be a dirty hack, but it’s a useful one. And as a programmer, I know that useful dirty hacks are the best kinds of dirty hacks.
Inbox Zero Achievement: Unlocked
It’s really pretty simple: if you follow these rules, your signal-to-noise ratio in your inbox will get much, much better. You’ll lose fewer emails and the mental weight of having 4,000 emails in your inbox will be gone.
If this helps you please ❤ the article, and if you have any other tips for keeping your inbox clean, please let me know by replying here or on Twitter! And I don’t even mind email (jamon@infinite.red). 😉 Just make sure it’s a good one!
