Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero - it does exist!!

I'm on a Getting Things Done kick this week, attempting to organize my brain and my life so I don't feel so fucking overwhelmed and stressed out all the fucking time. Ahem.

Gracie and I spent two glorious days in the Brecon Beacons the weekend before last, without any data or mobile reception. As soon as we drove back toward civilization both our phones exploded with hundreds of new emails. Just what I wanted to deal with at a dirty Welsh truck stop with an epic wedding-guest hangover. I couldn't tell if it was the prospect of wading through my inbox or the impulse-bought Burger King mozzarella sticks that made me more nauseous.

I've been using Outlook Tasks and my inbox as a to-do list, and had primitive rules set up for inbox filtering - a system that was clearly not working as my Outlook Tasks contains pages of quasi-relevant emails from as far back as April.

Gracie has been using Mailbox for six months now and swears by it. I love the idea of triaging email once - do it now, delegate it or defer it. I often find myself reading the same email multiple times which is utter bollocks. Unfortunately Mailbox only supports Gmail accounts and I have to sync corporate mail across five devices.

I figured Outlook has to have solved this problem, even without the pretty UI interactions. And behold, it is good.

What I have done is basically this method of emptying my inbox using the Trusted Trio, but with a couple extra hacks:

1.  Rules. Mine weren't working. I filtered JIRA notifications and some other auto-spam folders but I still had 100+ messages a day from distribution lists clogging up my inbox.

For the past couple of days I've sent all my DL mail (except for my direct team's low-volume DL) to a single DLs folder, which I check a couple of times a day. It is ridiculous how much this decreases my inbox load and the time and headspace this has saved me already.

2. Follow Up - the first rule of inbox triage. I call this folder Tasks, not Follow Up, because whatever. A Task is anything I receive that needs an action but can't be completed in under two mins. Because otherwise just do it, right? GTD style.

Tasks is my To-Do list. And awesomely enough, I get close to zeroing it out most days. When a task is complete, of course it gets moved out of Tasks into another folder. Otherwise shit would be bananas!

3. Hold - this is the stuff that doesn't require action from me, but that I might need to keep track of. Maybe it's an ongoing thread with some key info, or an answer I'm waiting on from somebody. I plan to review this folder regularly so I can chase things or delete/archive them once they're no longer active.

4. Archive - everything that I read that doesn't require action gets moved out of the Inbox to this folder. I don't really delete anything except OOO mail so this is essentially trash/storage combined.

This is the biggest difference for me and what has allowed me to reach Inbox Zero for the first time EVER. If I read something and don't need to act on it, I move it so I don't have to look at it or think about it again. The commitment is not to leave read shit polluting your lovely inbox whitespace.

5. Category searches - I've added a few Outlook categories to make it easier to search for things. Of course this should all be stuff that requires no current action so it probably lives in Work Archive.

So far I only have reference tags and a tag for product ideas I may want to revisit somewhere down the line, but I can see the potential for other tags like "Learning", "Worth Reading" and project specific reference categories.


This is pretty basic lifehacking, but it's a step in managing the firehose that is my email. I'm excited to mess around with other GTD hax as I go, like calendar reminders and syncing to OneNote.

Have you ever seen an empty inbox before? What's your system like?

And how do you manage to sync it across different devices? I have an iPhone, a Windows phone and an Android tablet as well as a couple of Win8 and Mac laptops - hey! I'm a platform agnostic! - so it should be fun to see how this method scales cross-OS. Thank the lord (Ballmer?) for SkyDrive.