Inbox zero has fallen out of fashion as a buzzword, but used to be bandied about as the height of productivity.
I’ve never believed that, however, my brain does work much better when my various inboxes are empty and my actions are in a dedicated actions list. This article touches on some of the things I do to help keep my email inboxes nice and clean. Consider it food for thought as what works for me may not work for you.
What is inbox zero?
Inbox zero is so much more than not having any emails in your inbox. If it were as simple as that you could select all and archive.
I’m paraphrasing and some “gurus” will be annoyed at my oversimplification, but the idea behind inbox zero is to take a mature approach to how you use email to make sure you process everything that comes in in a timely manor.
Batch process emails, checking them at set times
I will be the first to admit that I check my email too often, it is a bad habit. That being said, when I do check it I go through a process.
Anything that can be actioned in about a minute, I will do. It isn’t always the most important thing to get done that day, but it stops be having to think about it again.
Anything I can’t action almost immediately, and by action I mean, read the email, then either respond to the email, or decide the email doesn’t need any follow-up; I will create actions of next steps, then archive or delete the email.
It might seem odd to make an action or todo item based on an email. My rationale is that I should compare that task with all my other tasks to decide on priority, I can’t do that from an email inbox where random other emails are popping in.
The important bit here, is by the end of be being in my emails I will have read and processed all the emails. Most of the time this means my inbox is empty and my todo list is a little more full.
The skeuomorphism of the inbox
Your email inbox, or any digital inbox, for example your DMs on social media, is a borrowed concept from physical mail. A literal box that stuff would go into.
An inbox isn’t organised storage, anyone can add to it. Because anyone can add to it, the most sane thing to do is clear it out every so often and deal with the contents somewhere else.
It is easy to see in a physical box that it would be super weird to have an important payment reminder sitting under some junk mail you’ve received.
There is an argument that the ability to search your emails detaches your inbox from its physical history. This is true, but since your inbox is the first thing you see in your emails, and since if you miss an email you won’t know it is there to think to search for it, for me at least, keeping it tidy makes a lot of sense.
When to archive and when to delete
I delete anything transactional that I won’t need again, an email to say my report has been generated is of no use once I’ve downloaded the report. I will also delete marketing or sales emails that have no value.
Pretty much anything else gets archived. I have a lot of available space for my emails and I can always delete them after if they come up in a search and I see they have no value.
Remove myself from mailing lists that don’t provide loads of value
Mailing lists can be amazing, and I’m subscribed to several of them, but they can also be a source of a lot of noise.
If you find yourself automatically archiving emails from a particular place, or only giving something the most cursory of skims, remove yourself.
Your inbox will be lighter, and you’ve slightly reduced the senders’ overheads. Win win!
One real quick tip is to search your mail for the word “unsubscribe” which will surface lots of mailing list emails.
Try and word my emails to limit receiving additional emails
The problem with emails is they generate more emails! In order to help, it is useful to try and word your emails in a way that a response isn’t necessary. There are a few ways of doing this. These are things that help your recipients, as well as keeping your inbox more quiet.
You can ask for veto instead of permission, so instead of “can I do this thing”, say something like “I will do this thing on Thursday unless I hear back before then”, this way the recipient doesn’t need to reply in order for you to be unblocked. Which takes a lot of pressure off other people, which is nice!
You can preempt follow up, before hitting send, take 30 seconds to consider what the likely responses might be and consider if there is something you can add to your email that would address those concerns. A basic example would be if you reference “the report we talked about last month”, a reasonable follow up someone might have would be to see that report again to jog their memory, so updating your line to be a link to said report would be useful.
This email could have been a meeting
Sometimes email isn’t the best communication tool. I happen to love email and prefer it to lots of other forms of communication, but sometimes picking something up on the next call, or via something like Slack is the better shout.
We had a client that for years we would work through email, neither of us knowing that we both heavily used Slack and we would get more done faster if we communicated through it.
Of course this maybe doesn’t reduce your overall amount of inputs, but it does group them slightly better, and places like Slack have way more context built into them that your email inbox does.