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Comment by bendyorke | Hacker News Reader

I have two groups of emails: "professional" and "online" ones. I'll "inbox 0" my "professional" emails, archiving, deleting, and snoozing emails. For my "online" emails, I don't do any management, it's just a giant inbox of every email I've received.

The advantage I find to archiving messages is just a slight psychological boost. When the inbox is empty, I know I have nothing to do. If I have <20 emails (I always try to keep these inboxes under 20), I can see everything I have to do. As I work my way through the list, it's obvious visual feedback that I'm making progress. Just little things that I feel slightly improve my experience.

Although this only works because I have my other massive "online" inbox :D

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What do you do about long-duration TODO items, like "Fix XYZ bug", which are a lower priority than your current tasks? I tend to Star those in Gmail, and leave them read but not-archived.

Some of these threads (for me) are good explanations/resources about a particular problem, but which I can't act on yet as $OtherTask is higher priority. I have Jira tickets for most of these, but even so the inbox helps remind me (roughly monthly) that things are still Not Fixed, whereas a TODO label would end up being unread.

Maybe it's just that I've been depending on that and have NOT been using a TODO or similar label for things, and thus am not in the habit of checking for New Things in my filtered labels. I'll have to think about this more. Thanks in advance for your insight. :)

You've elucidated the reason I just bought OmniFocus. I need a system outside of all other systems to keep track of it all. I have 4 separate email systems to keep track of. Google's tool won't help me with 2 of them (or a ticketing system, or whatever). I used a web-based TODO manager for years, but I finally spent the money to get a native application. The integration of highlighting something -- in any app, or an email, or a web page -- and then hitting a keystroke to capture it, and give it a to-do, has proven pretty effective to me. THAT'S my inbox, and THAT'S the one place I check when I need to find something to do.

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