How do I get Inbox Zero?

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In April 2008, the New York Times published an article which uncovered that nearly a third of one’s work day is spent on irrelevant items and distractions such as email. The Radicati Group found that the average person is on track to spend nearly half of their day staring at email.

Our innovation and information has quadrupled over the past century. But why hasn’t our value grown proportionally? Or our effectiveness skyrocketed?

Looking at the late nineties and early twenty-first century, our innovation within the information realm outshines the industrial age. The wealth of available information on demand, as well as our ability to communicate anytime, anywhere, is insane. Yet, amidst this firestorm of information innovation, we’ve lost touch with what truly adds value to the world, and what truly makes us different from computers.

We’ve shifted from a society of artists and specialists to one that stares at digital pixels all day. The way we use email endangers our purpose. It threatens our potential to innovate and create art.

Our creator didn’t put us on earth to process inputs and spit out outputs. We’re here to think, to shape, to give and to create.

Email and your Focus

If you get a lot of email — and let’s face it, knowledge workers live in their Email(and slack). Email constantly attacks your focus. But are you doing it as quickly and efficiently as possible, so you can get back to your real work? If not, you must learn how to make email work for you.

Have you ever driven home from work, and wondered what you actually did that day? Or if you even did anything productive. You fear you were just busy with items that were good for one thing: keeping you busy.

A day filled with shooting the breeze with employees, answering questions, staring at emails, checking social networks and chatting with colleagues won’t make you efficient. It’ll make you busy. There’s too much information flying at us, and in order to fulfill your purpose, you must learn to respectfully say no, and decline distraction.

In order to master the art of sifting through email, and not getting distracted by irrelevant items, we’ll first outline the nature of email itself. We’ll then outline an appropriate philosophy towards email and then show you the process of batching email.

The Nature of Email

Email is a radically different form of communication than any other form. It combines two elements that make it less personal than other forms of communication: 1. lack of time, and 2. lack of personality. Other forms of communication like meeting up with people, mailing a letter or picking up the phone to call someone possesses at least one of those two elements. Email is instant. And with less time spent writing an email, also comes less meaning. Yet, this is fine–if you understand the nature of email, that is.

A person gets more meaning, and a bigger smile from a phone call than an email. Same goes for meeting in person. Why? Because you’ve invested actual time in delivering the message. Time is not only money; time is value. As you invest time with someone, you’re also investing value in that relationship.

Understanding these characteristics will help you to put your interpretation of email into perspective:

1. Emails usually aren’t emergencies
Emails may be emergencies in the mind of the sender; but if you take a step back, an email message isn’t going to contain life or death information.

2. Bite-sized clarifications or confirmations
Email isn’t an appropriate medium for negotiating, agreeing on items or correcting term sheets. Not only does it take longer to read through the other’s response, you’ll also have to wait for him or her to get back to you. That lag time can get long, and annoying. After a certain point within an email thread, it’s wise to just pick up the phone & give the person a call.

3. Emails aren’t insightful
Emails are worse than reading a children’s book because at least children’s books contain words, and are proofread. If you’re spending half your day staring at digital jargon, guess what you’ll end up spewing out to others throughout the day? Digital jargon.

Your philosophy towards Email

Your philosophy and attitude towards email determines how productive you are using email. Here’s the thing: Only your attitude can improve your email productivity.

Mastering email isn’t complex, and doesn’t warrant thousands of applications and books written about it. The key with leveraging email for productivity is first founded on your philosophy and attitude towards email itself.

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Three steps to mastering email productivity

1. Batch processing email at designated times: In order to make this process work, schedule a specific time of day to work on e-mail. It’s most efficient to do all your emails in groups, rather than processing them as they come in. For this reason, turn off your email notification. Set times during the day (first thing in the morning, post lunch, & at the end of the day) and give yourself 10-15 minutes to process e-mail your inbox.

2. Don’t leave an item unread: Before outlining the principles of effective email use, do understand that the key with avoiding procrastination centers on processing every single email, and taking a specific action with it. Choosing to not do anything will hurt your productivity. There are four actions that you must take when processing email:

RAFT: With this system, you take the time to read an email first, then act on it however you need to before either filing it away somewhere or deleting it. Helps in quickly sorting your email.

• Read
• Act
• File (Archive it): No action is required now, but something might need to be done later. However, you don’t want to let it sit in your inbox consuming psychic energy. Instead drag it into a label and use Search to locate messages you have filed away for future reference.
• Trash

The action you must avoid is leaving item marked unread. If you’ve left an item unread, you’ve procrastinated.

Get the most out of RAFT

To maximize the benefits, you should combine this with another system or two. For instance, combine RAFT with the LIFO—last in, first out—method, answer your most recent emails before older ones. If you do this, you’ll always be acting on the most urgent needs instead of playing endless catch-up with things that you let slip by.

When it comes to the acting part, you can rely on 4D method to help you out. Open each email, one at a time, and make a decision on what to do with it. The four Ds are

• Do it now: If it takes 2 minutes or less to respond to an email, then do it now & get it off your plate. This is David Allen’s “Two Minute Rule,” & I have found it to be a great boon to my personal productivity. Most emails, only require a couple of sentences to reply anyway.
• Delete the message. Spam, most ads, & many e-mail newsletters fall into this category.
• Delegate it. If the action requires an action, ask, “Am I the right person to do it?” If not, then you need to delegate it to the person who needs to act on it. (forward and archive)
• Defer it for later and add it to your to-do list. If it will take some thought to write a response, Or if it has an action in it that needs to be done later(and then archive). If you’ve a deadline you are trying to meet. Add this to Tasks and schedule a specific day and time to do it and then configure task notifications accordingly.

Either do what the email says or delegate it to someone who can, but keep the process moving swiftly. Do one of those, quickly, with each email, and move on to the next. The main rule of RAFT is you have to do something with every message. That’s really all there is to it, but it works because it requires you to focus on each individual email and make an assessment right away, so you don’t miss anything. When you’re done, you’ll have an empty inbox.

3. The three questions: Refer the below image as a process that will allow you to conquer email, and be productive with it.

That’s it. It’s simple, yet takes some practice to implement effectively.

Most people are bombarded with e-mails throughout the day and due to that are overwhelmed. Like a tennis match, some feel obligated to hit every ball back across the net as soon as it lands in their court. Others eventually give up & allow the tennis balls to cover them up. Occasionally, they take a swing, but they can never seem to dig out from under the pile. Meanwhile, the never-ending assault of e-mail messages continues. The problem is in the assumption, that you must answer every e-mail as it is received. In fact, this is a sure-fire way to kill your productivity & end up becoming a slave to e-mail rather than using it as a tool to accomplish your work on your terms.

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Still struggling with managing your Email, with the help of some of the rules and tricks shared below you can crank quickly, and get out. There are a lot of methods to try in the never-ending quest for a way to sort through and slim down our bulging inboxes. Most important of them, master the tools of your trade and you will soon be churning through your email and it won’t take too much time/effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, and improve your noise to signal ratio. Let’s get into it:

Long term solutions:

• Managing multiple email accounts with Gmail: It’s common to have more than one email address these days. Though you may never be able to consolidate all of your email to one email address, you can at least deal with all of your email from one account using Google Mail Fetcher. Set up your non-Gmail account to forward your mail to your main Gmail address. So, you’re able to check/view all messages of different accounts from a single account. For example, all of the Hotmail, Yahoo, and secondary Gmail email comes straight to my Gmail, at which point I never ever have to open any other email Inbox ever and Gmail automatically uses the appropriate email address when replying.
• Reduce your inflow by Unsubscribing: Inboxes overflowing with newsletters(mailing lists) and other irrelevant stuff are probably among the worst things when it comes to Inbox Zero. About 20% of comes from email newsletters & companies I’ve account with in the past. Many of these, I don’t care receiving anymore or recall opting into—even legitimate companies. These messages are not exactly spam, so don’t get filtered. Do yourself a favor, and click on the “Unsubscribe” link at end of email. Takes few seconds, but reduces the clutter in Inbox permanently. You can drastically reduce the number of emails you receive, and thus reduce the amount of time needed to process your inbox, by stopping many of these automated emails.
• No reply needed. Not every email requires a reply. Learn to spot those instantly. It might just be an FYI email, which you can note and then archive. Or it might be something forwarded to you — delete or archive those immediately. Try to avoid responding to emails in which you’re just in the “cc” field, not in the “to” field. Replying to fewer emails means less time spent cranking through your inbox.
• Sort your inbox by sender: Instead of relying on the chronology of when each email came in, sort by sender to weed through the mess. When purging your messages, you’ll probably follow, the 4Ds. You go through and decide what gets deleted, done, delegated, or deferred—but there’s not much pattern recognition if you’re just starting at the top and working your way down. Sorting your inbox by sender helps you see who (or what) messages you receive most. If it’s a mailing list, you can delete them all in one go, but if it’s a specific person, you might get a signal that they need a response from you. So instead of deleting or delegating emails one by one, you can try dealing with entire batches from certain senders to make the sorting process faster. With GMail you can’t sort your entire inbox by sender, instead make bundles by sender. If you’ve already found a message from the person or entity whose emails you want to bundle up, you can right-click it from your inbox and hit “find emails from.” This brings you to an inbox only of messages from that sender. You can also access this inbox by typing “from:[their email address]” in the search bar, or clicking the advanced search button and entering their name into the “from” field.
• Search: Search operators in Gmail work much the same as they do with Google. Type the operator followed by a colon, and then your search term (e.g., to:tips@techcrunch.com). Likewise, you can exclude terms from your search with the hyphen (-). The search operators allow you to limit the scope of your search to the to (to:), from (from:), and subject (subject:) fields. You can also search based on labels (label:), emails with attachments (has:attachment), and even dates (after:/before:yyyy/mm/dd). Search operators come in especially handy if you need more flexibility when setting up filters (you can add any search term to the “Has the words” field). Here’s a comprehensive list of Gmail search operators.
• Keyboard shortcuts. This is where Gmail really starts to shine. Using the mouse takes way too much motion (and thus time). Use keyboard shortcuts (complete list) as much as possible, and your cranking skills increase dramatically. Just a few I use a lot: “c” for compose, “r” for reply, “y+o” to archive and move to the next message, “tab+Enter” to send a message after composing it, “/” to search, “j” and “k” to move up and down the list of emails, “#+o” to delete and then open the next message. It may take a little time to get the shortcuts embedded in memory, but you can easily bring up the list of shortcuts at any time in Gmail by typing a question mark (?).
• Set up labels: Labels are great because you can apply multiple labels to one email, making your email that much easier to find, no matter which folder it is into. Think of them as tags. Setting up labels is super-easy, go through your email and figure out how you might want to categorize your emails. I generally create labels for any mailing lists I’m on, along with labels for different work-related emails and an ever-important Follow-up label for the emails I want to make sure I remember to reply to. Your labels will revolve around your needs, and I’d encourage you to examine your email and develop one. There are a lot of advantages of labels over folders. For e.g. if you choose to delete a label because you no longer find it useful, the associated email will not be deleted. Instead, the label is simply removed. While labels are great on their own – and I label some messages after they land in my Inbox – but there are a lot of instances where you can assign labels automatically based on the characteristics of the message, thus saving yourself the work. That’s where filters come in.
• Set up Filters. Gmail offers a lot of power for filtering your incoming email based on six criteria: From, To, Subject, Has the words, Doesn’t have, and Has attachment. After you choose your criteria, choose any combination of the following options: Skip the Inbox (Archive), Star it, Apply the label…, Forward it to, and Delete it. I’ve a couple dozen filters set up. For example, all newsletter emails go to “Mailing list” label, and they don’t fill up my inbox. Same with Google Calendar notifications. I also have others, those get shunted into their own label and archived and few deleted immediately. Here’s another way to get around some of this clutter. Gmail ignores certain symbols, like dots (.) and plusses (+) in addresses, but it still notices that these emails are different from the standard spelling. When you utilize this behavior and combine it with Gmail filters, you can set up a super simple set of rules to direct unimportant emails away from your inbox. Just add plus sign to the end of your username and add any letters or numbers behind it you find helpful, like: username+newsletters@gmail.com (username as a placeholder for your user name). Test this by signing up for any newsletter using the address syntax above. Once you’ve received the first email to this address, set up a rule with a label “Newsletters” and automatically transfer any incoming mails addressed to your +newsletters email to Archive, skipping the inbox altogether.
• Minimize abuse of your email: Want to know who’s selling off your email address? Use above trick to find out. Sign up for a website with “username+website@gmail.com” and then when you start getting spam, it will be delivered to the email address you used for that website. To create more filters, you can use other kinds of custom addresses, like username+delivery@gmail.com for food delivery, username+shopping@gmail.com for online stores, username+travel@gmail.com for hotels and flights, or any other category that makes sense to you. This approach makes it easy to remember which address you’re using for which service, and you only need to create one rule for each of your custom addresses — no need to manage rules for all possible incoming email addresses from dozens of businesses. If you use a password manager, you don’t even need to remember these custom addresses for all your services. These extra email addresses are also an additional security measure if your primary email address is publicly available and someone tries to use it to gain access to a service you’re signed up for. They’d also need to guess the right custom email address other than the password. If you want to be less open about these rules, like when you communicate with friends or clients, you can just give out your email address with a different variation of dots sprinkled into it, like user.name@gmail.com or us.ername@gmail.com. Using username@googlemail.com instead of username@gmail.com is another sneaky filtering option.
• @reply: Set up a time each day to go through your ‘@reply’ label, so your @reply label doesn’t get overwhelming, and you don’t become one of those people to whom email gets lost. Respond within a day and If you don’t want to respond, just delete.
• Knock out repetitive email: OK, so how do you crank faster? If you do a lot of repetitive typing in emails (type the same thing few times a day? consider it repetitive), you can really knock down your repetitive emails quickly with Phraseexpress. — from automated replies to multiple signatures, save yourself tons of valuable time by setting up a few regular keyboard shortcuts for text replacement. I use different signatures, depending on who I’m writing to, and after setting up PE text replacement for each signature, I can just type a few keystrokes and the appropriate signature is generated.
• OHIO(Only Handle It Once): The most unproductive thing you can do to e-mail is to read the same email over & over again. This has the effect of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your workload. Instead, you should read each message once, then decide what to do with it. Read-decide. Read-decide is the pattern of effective e-mail processing to end up with an empty inbox daily.

Whether you’re reading Getting Things Done, or The Four Hour Work Week, or Inbox Zero, you’ll find they all outline a similar philosophy. Why? Because it works. With all of these systems in place, it is easy to manage Inbox Zero with Gmail.

What tips and tricks do you use to enhance your email experience? let us know in the comments below.
Look forward to a leaner, meaner inbox!