A little over a year ago Ashley sent me a link to a video of Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk which was entitled Inbox Zero.  She had watched it (or at least read a review of it) and found that it reminded her a lot of me and the way I handled my inbox.  Ashley and I shared a really big corner office for a few months (and later we were joined by Lynn) in which we really got to know the ins and outs of each others work habits.  Some of those habits aren’t really cut-out for a public forum such as this (even though I rarely hold anything back here), but one point of playful contention between us was the way we handled our email inboxes.

Ashley’s inbox was always full of shit.  She had maybe one or two thousand emails in her inbox at any given time.  She would only really clear it out (and by clear it out I mean whittle the thousands down to hundreds) when she found herself uber-unmotivated on a really slow day (and there were very few of those).  My inbox on other hand was (and still is) completely empty. See:

Most people that see my inbox, and know that I am a knowledge worker whose main channel of communication is e-mail, are baffled at how barren of a wasteland it is.  I sometimes get hundreds of emails a day, and yet my inbox is empty.  I have several different email accounts all forwarding to my one Gmail account, and yet my inbox is empty.

And so there I was, a little over a year ago watching Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero and hearing a world-renown expert in his field (online productivity) validate the efficacy of the way I manage my inbox to the employee’s at Google (a world-renown expert in it’s field (the Internets)).  It was like I had always known something to be true in my heart, but couldn’t explain why, and then Jehovah himself came down to whisper into my ear all the reasons why. But really, it was just common sense.  A cluttered workspace, means a cluttered mind.

Now I don’t expect any of you to know who Merlin Mann is, or want to devote an hour of your life watching his talk.  But if you are all interested, I implore you to take an hour out of your week (instead of watching some shitty television show), pop some popcorn and sit in front of your computer and watch it.  For those of you who ‘work out of your inbox’ and even for those of you who don’t, you may find that just applying some of the tidbits that he discusses changes your day-to-day life, as it would surely have changed mine if I wasn’t already an inbox prophet.

For those of you who won’t watch it, I won’t paraphrase any of what he says (if you want to reap the rewards, you have to put in the effort), but what I will do is explain my process (which is a super simplified lite-version of Inbox Zero).  It’s really quite simple.

Overnight, emails show up in my inbox (especially with the time difference).  I open my inbox, and read through my emails.  I start from the bottom and work my way up.  Each email gets read (or at least glanced over) and I then make a decision about it.

• Does the email warrant a response? Ads/Newsletters/Forwards/Updates/Notifications don’t so they get read and then archived immediately.
• If the email warrants a response, will it take more then 10 seconds?  Responses that only require a ‘yes or no’, or ‘I’ll do this today/tomorrow’, or ‘Let me know when it arrives’ get sent immediately and the email gets archived immediately afterward.
• If the email warrants a response or action, and it will take more then 10 seconds, the email gets ‘Starred’.

The ‘Starred’ feature in Gmail is a great way to mark emails that have some form of outstanding action to be taken.  Whether it be an order confirmation that you want to keep starred until the order is sent, a UPS/FedEx tracking number email that you want to keep starred until the package arrives, or just an email that warrants a response that will take longer then 10 seconds, they all get starred.  In a matter of minutes you will have made it through all the mails in your inbox, and you will have responded to all the emails that were quick responses, and starred anything else.  Your inbox is now empty, and all your action related emails are starred.  Revel in the empty inbox message that your mail provider of choice displays for you.

Then, throughout the day, whenever it’s convenient, you go to your Starred emails and write responses to those that required longer compositions, or convert the items in the emails into to-do items on your to-do list, or check for Starred emails whose responses were contingent on events that may have occurred during the day (like receiving a package, or unstarring an email that had conference call details for a call that already took place).  Whatever the action may be, if you have time to take it, take it when you can.  Slowly but surely your starred emails will begin to diminish and begin to look more and more like your anorexic inbox.

Gmail recently released a new feature in their Labs (you can access this by clicking on the green flask in the top right user menu of the Gmail interface), which allows you to have multiple types of stars (you can use one color for packages or call information or really any date related actions, another for personal emails that you want to take your time writing back to, and yet another color for items that need to be converted into to-dos in your task management application).  This is something I haven’t bothered doing yet, because a single star icon works for me.  As I write this I have zero emails in my inbox, and a single starred email.  So clearly, I’m doing something right.  Feel free to share any inbox productivity tips you may have, since most everyone is back to work now after the holidays and I’m sure their inboxes are full of shit.

Tags: Action Items, Ashley, FedEx, Gmail, Google, Google Tech Talk, Inbox Zero, Joshua Radin, Labs, Lynn, Merlin Mann, Star Mile, Starred, UPS

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.