Five Steps to Inbox Zero (Inbox 0.1?)

Posted on 13. Jul, 2011 by ger in Email, New Ways to Work

Suddenly, loads of people are complaining about email. MG Siegler is quitting email. Lucy Kellaway in the Irish & Financial Times bemoans the lack of an email charter. Mark Suster finds some signal in the noise of all his email.

However, I believe this is a symptom of a larger issue of having too much stuff to deal with, and trying to deal with it the wrong way. It’s like trying to use a bucket to stop the tide.

While email is brilliant, one of the biggest technological advances in the last 50 years, I believe people are now using email as a simple task/project management system and it just can’t cope. I’ll return to the bigger picture of what’s broken about email in a separate blog post soon.

First, let’s do something about the immediate problem, the overwhelming inbox. Merlin Mann has written a series of blog posts on a technique he called inbox zero. I’ve seen people try to apply these ideas, and while they worked for a while, many people ended up back at Inbox 1024. In this post I’m going to focus on the first steps of getting to inbox zero and even simplifying it further (maybe we could call it Inbox 0.1).

I’m also going to incorporate ideas from David Allen and Tim Ferriss (one of a number of authors who suggests batching email processing).

Why should I do something?

Whether you realize it or not, all of your unprocessed “stuff” is there in the back of your mind, bugging you in little unconscious ways.

Do you see that letter balanced on the edge of your desk, the one you’re meant to sign it and return to the accountants? Every time your sub-conscious notices it in your peripheral vision it interrupts your train of thought and distracts you from what you’re trying to do. These micro-interruptions cost time and energy. The same thing happens with emails in your inbox.

When you have an email inbox which doesn’t fit on one screen, sub-consciously there’s a little part of your brain worrying about the emails you can’t see that you should have replied to.

Step 1: Look those emails in the eye

Before you can organize your existing email, you need to evaluate what’s in your inbox. I know this might be painful, but trust me, it’s essential.

If you’re like most people you have hundreds (maybe thousands) of emails in your inbox. Many of them might even be unread.

  • Go back to the oldest item in the inbox. Is it something that really needs to be done?
  • Look at the emails on the second page of your inbox, does anything there need to be done?
  • Look at any emails you’ve marked with stars or flags.

If you’ve found emails that you’d kept or marked with flags or stars and they no longer need to be done, pat yourself on the back, at least you didn’t waste time doing something about them in the past. But why are you keeping them now?

Maybe you found emails, that you wished you’d done something about. Maybe it’s too late to reply now. Those emails are the diamonds that were lost in the mud of all the other emails in your inbox.

Step 2: Clear the Inbox

  • Create a new folder in your email client called “Todo Old Inbox”. Sometime in the next few weeks you’ll come back to these emails and process them.
  • Now move all of the emails in your inbox to “Todo Old Inbox”. Look at your new empty inbox, how does that feel?

Step 3: Set up a new simple workflow

  • Turn off your desktop email notification.
  • Create three new email folders “Archive”, “Someday” and “Action”. Some email clients (gMail) use labels instead of folders.

“Archive” is for emails you want to keep but don’t need to do anything about.

“Someday” is for emails you might want to do something about but don’t really have to. Guess what’s going to happen to these emails?

“Action” is for emails you must do something about.

Step 4: Save the diamonds

Did you uncover any diamonds when you looked at your inbox?

  • Go to the “Todo Old Inbox”, find them again, and move them to “Action”. If you have more than seven, you should only move the most important seven.

Step 5: Your new simple workflow

  • If your work role allows it, try to avoid your inbox first thing in the morning. Instead do some significant task, or answer some of the emails in your “Action” folder.
  • Twice a day (I recommend mid-morning and mid-afternoon) process your inbox oldest-to-newest to zero.
  • As you look at each email, make a simple decision (”Delete”, “Archive”, “Someday”, “Action”, or “Reply”). Only reply when it will take less than two minutes.
  • At other points in the day you can work on the emails in the “Action” folder. Start with the oldest.
  • At the end of the day if you have more than 20 emails in “Action”, review the new ones. Could any be moved to “Someday”, “Archive” or deleted?

Tell us what you think

We’d really like to know about your experiences and opinions of Inbox Zero. Did you make it stick? Was it easy to get to zero at first? If you try the variant I’ve suggested, please let me know how you get on.