Inbox Zero
Image by Jan Vasek (JESHOOTS.COM)
The volume of emails we receive in our inboxes, both at work and at home, can be a headache-inducing deluge. Newsletters, spam, surveys, discount offers, catalogues… and that’s not even mentioning the far more important emails we get from family, friends and colleagues. The never-ending torrent of emails we are all subjected to means that developing some sort of management technique for dealing with the deluge is essential. You might have come up with your own system, or you might have heard about the various techniques out there and tried to apply them yourself.
One of the dominant strategies of the last decade or so is “Inbox Zero”. Broadly speaking, the aim of this technique is for the user to always be striving to have no emails (or at least no unread ones) in the main inbox folder. This technique is not without its drawbacks and critics, and there are many different variations of it.
So, should you give it a try? Here at Blue Gum Admin & Tech, we say yes! This is the inbox management system I use and I believe it helps me be more productive. But what does Inbox Zero really involve? In the above paragraph, I gave a broad definition… and that’s the thing – exactly what Inbox Zero really means differs from user to user. Does “Zero” really mean no emails in your inbox at all? Or does it mean no unread emails? If you have two unread emails at the end of your workday, does it mean you’ve somehow failed to apply the system properly?
I don’t think there’s actually any one definition of Inbox Zero that is really suitable for everyone. Rather, I think it's more valuable for us all to take the elements of different versions of Inbox Zero that we find useful and adjust them to our own methods. Here I will detail exactly what Inbox Zero means to me and how I use it:
For me, Inbox Zero is the process of getting the number of unread emails in an inbox down to a manageable and workable number. I treat each new email that comes through as a type of task: while I am doing the task the email is marked as “unread”, once I finish the task (whether that involves just reading the email, responding to it, paying a bill, filling out a form etc.) I mark the email as “read” and move it to the appropriate place in another inbox folder or delete it.
Here are some examples of how I approach different emails:
I get a tech news summary email from a website I have subscribed to. I open the email, read the contents, mark it as “read” and immediately either move it to a folder (“News”, “Info” etc.) or delete it if I think I won’t need a record of the information in it any longer.
I get an electricity bill email. I read it, note down when the bill is due on the calendar and mark the email as “read”. However, I keep this “read” email in the main inbox folder until the bill is actually paid. Once it is paid, I move it to the appropriate folder (which you might label “bills”, “utilities” etc.).
I get an email reminding me I need to update my business details on a government webpage form. Once I read the email, I have two options:
I can keep the email as “unread” in my main inbox until I have filled in the webpage form (and then file it in the appropriate folder).
I can immediately create a separate reminder for what needs to be done, whether that is a calendar item or in a task-management app, mark the email as “read” and either file it in a folder or keep it unread in the main inbox until the task is completed (when it is then moved into the appropriate folder).
The main thing I hope you can see from the above examples is that emails coming into my inbox are always kept moving. Once an email has been “actioned” in whatever way is needed, it is marked as “read” and either deleted or moved into a specific folder. Anything that is still marked “unread” in the main inbox is then an email which needs actioning – anything marked “read” has been dealt with in some way, but the corresponding task might not have been completed yet. When deciding what to do with read/completed emails in your main inbox folder, you need to ask yourself whether you will ever need them again (in which case file them in a folder), or if you don’t, delete them!
By using the above system, a quick look at how many unread emails are in my inbox tells me immediately how much work I have coming up! It means that by quickly glancing at my inbox I have a good idea about what tasks haven’t been started yet (unread emails) and how many have been started but haven’t been completed (read emails in the main inbox).
But what if you get to the end of the day and you still have unread emails in your main inbox folder – have you failed? This is the real trick with how to treat Inbox Zero – it should not be a hard and fast rule, but rather a methodology in how to deal with incoming emails (i.e. incoming work). The problem (as you might have realised) with trying to follow “Inbox Zero” literally is that it is a losing battle!
There is nothing you can do to stop new emails coming through and “ruining” your nice clean empty inbox, so if your end-goal is to always have zero emails in your main inbox you will always be disappointed. Rather, my goal in trying to follow my own Inbox Zero system is to have a driving force behind my workflow in treating incoming emails. I know that I will never actually have a completely empty inbox, but in setting my mind to try and achieve an empty inbox, I am keeping myself in the right headspace to deal with emails efficiently and keep my email workspace tidy and easy to navigate.
So, in my opinion you are still following Inbox Zero even if you have unread emails at the end of the day – that’s the next day’s work! You are succeeding if you are sorting through your emails efficiently, keeping your inbox as clean and manageable as you can and not holding on to emails you don’t need.
I hope the above gets you thinking about how to apply the elements of Inbox Zero you need to your own email management, whether or not you use my particular method. We can all benefit from sharing our different workflow methods and tips and I’m always excited to hear about the different solutions everyone can come up with!