Inbox Zero for Life
xph.us
xph.us
Would be interested to see how he's going 4+ years later.
At least for personal mailboxes I've found 'inbox zero' a thankless task and have settled for "inbox as a feed" in which I trust that anything important will catch my attention (e.g. via Priority Inbox or multiple emails) and everything else will fade away. For what it's worth, this means I currently have 12k+ emails that I'll never open.
Priority Inbox highlights anything that actually comes from a human.
Multiple emails are more effective (for me) for automated and marketing emails, e.g. "right, I should remember to buy some more shirts from that company that keeps sending me offers", or "that domain is expiring soon, I noted that it was 30 days out last email but now it's getting closer".
Given the importance/actionability of these kinds of emails roughly approximates status updates on Facebook's News Feed, my approach has been similar (browse, trust that my eye will catch anything important, don't waste effort trying to read through every single piece of information).
You're right that I could make an effort to read through each email I receive immediately and decide whether its actionable, but this approach works well for me with very little effort.
30 s : "Hej Joe, can you send <document> to <client>?"
5 hrs: "Joe, also make sure they have signed the NDA first."
In short, any inbound email is redirected to a sub-folder. Three times a day, those emails are moved to my Inbox.
Now I only check my email those three times a day because I know my Inbox will be empty at all other times. At those three times, I apply a modified GTD system to empty the Inbox entirely.
I whitelist emails from my wife so they arrive in real-time.
This works on mobile and desktop.
The app is public and free: https://dndemail.com
If this advice is the solution to some peoples inbox problem then I don't understand their inbox problem.
> My biggest worry was that I’d just move the problem to another place: instead of an ever-growing inbox I’d have an ever-growing starred items folder. But a curious thing happened. My heavy inbox burden shrank a bit after the first processing session. And it just kept shrinking. My new starred items burden feels qualitatively different. Staring at a bold to-do-list inbox makes it all too easy to throw up your hands and close the browser. After all, even if you were to pick one of those emails and take care of it, it’d probably be replaced with 3 more, like a hydra, by the time you returned to your inbox. The ground is constantly shifting under you. On the other hand, your starred items folder only ever contains things that you put there. You can look at it, pick one thing to do, do that thing, and look again: there is now one fewer thing! You and you alone decide when to process incoming mail and star new messages. This might seem like an academic distinction, but let me tell you, it feels worlds apart, and I actually manage to knock off my starred items at a regular pace. They don’t pile up.