The Zero Inbox Strategy for Email Sanity

I’ve decided to take a little detour from the normal marketing articles to write about one of the necessary evils of business: staying on top of a constant deluge of email. Being a pretty tech-y guy, people ask me how I manage my email. I happen to use Google Apps to manage my email, but more importantly, I use all the power tools available to sort, label, tame my unruly inbox.

No matter what email system you use, whether you use webmail like Yahoo!, or Gmail, or a desktop client like Outlook or Thunderbird, your email system probably has these advanced tools. They’re easy enough to learn, and they will save you tons of time and emotional strain if you embrace them.

One of the easiest things to do to to stay on top of your email is to keep your inbox empty. This may seem foreign (especially to those who have 6500 unread emails in your inbox), but the zero inbox is very cleansing for your short term memory.

Now, just because an email isn’t in your inbox doesn’t mean it’s gone forever: quite the opposite. It just means that that email has been triaged for attention later.

Want to learn to attain the zero inbox and email sanity? Just follow this one simple rule:

“If you can’t answer it immediately, delete it, archive it, or put it in a folder.”

We’ll take the Gmail interface as an example. You’ll notice that there are 5 main buttons (4 of which are important to our demonstration). The buttons are Archive, Spam, Delete, and Move to Folder.

Each of these buttons has a special purpose in helping attain the zero inbox. For every email that comes your way, your job is to get it out of the inbox right away (it is called an inbox, not a save-every-email-you’ve-ever-gotten-box).

You’ve got a decision to make, the first one is if you want to “Delete” or “Spam” the email.

Delete and spam both do similar things. As you might expect, delete gets rid of the message all-together. If you really think that the message was junk, you can hit it with the spam button. Not only will this delete the message, but it will stop future messages like it from hitting your inbox again, and alert Google that that person is using shady email practices. Either way, the message is out of the inbox: never to be heard of again.

Then, respond to the ones you can clear out immediately.

For every message that you can respond to right way, do it. Get it out of your to do list. It’s much easier than keeping them up in your short term memory trying to remember to get to them. Sometimes its unavoidable to table a response for later, but I’ve found responding immediately to be a great stress-reliever.

For the ones you can’t take care of right away, put them in a folder.

Folders are one of the best organizational tools in email. Whenever you get an email you can’t handle, put it in a folder for your to take care of later. I have several different folders to handle my un-responded emails. The folders I use are:

• To-Do
• Follow Up
• Licence Keys, Passwords, Receipts, etc.

Once an email is in a folder, it’s out of your inbox but not forgotten. To remove an email from a folder (in Gmail, check instructions to do this in other systems), you just need to go to the folder, select the email, and click “Remove Label.” This will move the email out of the folder, and into the archive for safe keeping.

All the email that you don’t want to delete, but don’t have to follow up with you can simply archive.

Did you know that you can keep an email without it cluttering up your inbox? That’s what archiving is for! When you archive an email, it gets removed from your inbox, but is still available for use in the future.

If you find yourself forgetting to follow up with emails, getting overwhelmed by your messages, or just struggling to keep up with your messages, give the Zero Inbox Strategy a try.

A clear inbox is a clear mind. I know this from experience: I’ve been able to delete, spam, archive, and folder my inbox into a state of zen.

So, I’ve shared my email tip; now you share yours.  If you have a strategy for keeping on top of your emails, leave it in a comment below. I love to see how other’s keep on top of their messages.

If this article has inspired you to try the Zero Inbox, you might like to try Google Apps for your email.

Not only does Google offer Gmail, but the entire suite of Google tools for business. Contact Tech Nick Consulting if you would like to get your business on Google.