November 4th, 2008

How to Empty Your Inbox

 

A simple and beautiful option would be to delete every e-mail you receive, but that won’t make you productive, instead I will show you my method.

To some of us an empty inbox is heaven. No unread e-mails, no important replies. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to spend all of my time in my inbox, just lurking around.

I use mainly Gmail, because of the nice labels that the application offers and what’s best I can even color them too.

My method is based on two simple rules.

  1. I don’t let more than 15 unresolved (unread, un-replied,etc.) e-mails in my inbox
  2. If an e-mail needs action, but this action would take a long time and it could be postponed then I label the e-mail accordingly.

I have just two labels: @todo and @reply. I put the @ prefix to be on top of the labels list.

I usually label e-mails with @todo that requires actions outside of my inbox, e.g. e-mail from a client to fix a bug on a website, etc.

E-mails labeled with @reply will be answered later, but no more than 2 days after the e-mail was received.

My main browser is Firefox and I use the Gmail Manager plugin for e-mail updates which is a great plugin.

You’re welcome to try my method, it works for me, I cut down e-mailing exponentially.

Enjoy.

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