How to Maintain Inbox Zero

Marina Martin — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:21:54 +0000

We all aspire to Inbox Zero, but few of us actually stay there.

Here’s how I consistently maintain an empty inbox without ever declaring bankruptcy:

Get Your Own Domain Name, Already

If you don’t have your own domain name, you’re welcome to join us in the 21st century anytime. It’s just plain unprofessional to have a gmail.com (or, worse, yahoo.com!) email address.

You can pick up a domain for under $8/year at GoDaddy. Check RetailMeNot for the latest discount codes.

Pipe All Your POP accounts Through GMail

Am I thrilled to hand over yet another aspect of my life to The Google? No. Am I going to waste hours of my life in Thunderbird or (shudder) Outlook only to discover that my web host is handing over my mailing list activity to the Feds anyway? No.

(When you send mail from your POP account using the free edition of GMail, your @gmail address will be listed in the email headers. You can avoid this minor inconvenience by paying $50/year for Google Apps Premier Edition.)

Customize Your Email Addresses

Forget using yourname@yourdomain.com for everything. Instead, use the domain or company name of the site you’re giving your email address to.

For example:

For Upcoming.org notices, your email would be upcoming@yourdomain.com
For Bank of America, your email would be boa@yourdomain.com
For Oprah.com, your email would be oprah@yourdomain.com

…and so on.

This is not only a fantastic way to filter your email, it’s also a great way to find out who is selling your email address without your permission and stop that unwanted spam in its tracks.

The simplest way to do this is to just set your main POP account as a “catch-all.” Your mail host can help you with this if you need it. This means you’ll get all email sent to anything@yourdomain.com.

However, having a catch-all leaves you open to getting lots of erroneous spam mail. If that bothers you, you can set each new email address up as an “alias” to your regular POP account. A less-effective compromise would be to make some generic aliases like shopping@yourdomain.com and using that for related email communications.

Install the Greasemonkey Gmail Macro script (for Firefox)

You can get it here.

Learn Your Gmail Shortcuts

Between Gmail itself and the Gmail Macro script, there’s little you can’t do in a couple keystrokes.

Force yourself to use the keyboard shortcuts for each task in Gmail, and within a few days, they’ll all be second nature and you’ll be zooming through your Inbox in no time!

Make Gmail Do All the Work

There are lots of things you don’t need to see in your inbox at all. Use your Gmail filters (under “Settings”) to automatically label these emails and Skip the Inbox.

This is where the above custom email strategy works out well. Instead of having to know what email certain notices are coming from, you already know - and can filter based on - what email it’s going to.

For example:

Set all routine messages from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to bacn and Skip the Inbox.
Set all Google News Alerts and newsletter subscriptions to To Read and Skip the Inbox.
Set all messages from active mailing lists to [Mailing List Name] and Skip the Inbox.
Set all ads from shopping sites like Nordstrom and Lush to Shopping and Skip the Inbox.

For every email that arrives in your Inbox, ask yourself: Will I see an email like this again? Is there a filter I could set that would save me a step next time?

You’ll want to tweak your rules to best suit your needs. For example, I want Twitter direct message notifications to hit my inbox, but all other notifications from Twitter to be labeled as bacn.

Use Your Labels to Zip Through Your Inbox

Here’s what I do:

Starred items are those requiring some action on my part.

Keyboard shortcut: osy (o to open the email, s to star it, y to archive it.)
I have a label called '@WAITINGON'. If I'm waiting for a reply on something, I'll label either the email or my response.

Keyboard shortcut: ol@y (o to open the email, l to label it, @ to find my @WAITINGON label, y to archive.)

In other words, it takes me no more than four keystrokes to deal with ANY email effectively.

Check in with Yourself

Every night, I go through my starred items and my @WAITINGON label to update my Next Actions and Waiting On lists. This ensures nothing falls through the cracks. As for the email that skipped the inbox, I get to that when (and if) I have the time.

If this doesn’t work for your workflow, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment or drop me an email describing what you need done differently so I can see if I can help!

Freedom From Organization