Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox

Filed under: Business, Features, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Google, How-Tos

Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox

by Grant Robertson Nov 15th 2006

If your email volume is anything like mine, it's totally insane. Thousands of messages constantly streaming in and, only a tiny fraction of those are messages you need to see.

Surprising then, that only a few years ago I was literally living inside Microsoft Outlook. Rigid folders, the nightmarish rules "wizard", and that annoying inbox chime that dings regardless of which folder your new ~~distraction~~ message ultimately wound up.

I completely believe that Gmail saved my life. Okay, that's pushing it. Gmail didn't save my life. What Gmail (and a little bit of GTD-inspired respect for my own time) did was save my attention span. Some careful filtering and a bit of common sense returned a half hour or more of uninterrupted concentration per day.

That's 2.5 hours a week, over 10 hours a month and more than one whole day per year.

So, how did I do it?

I follow five simple rules. These rules are gospel, and if you want your life back you're going to have to treat them like your life depended on them. Email organization is easy, the commitment to continue is the hard part.

Five simple rules for keeping the inbox clean:

If you don't need to read it now, it shouldn't be in your inbox.
If you've already responded to it, it shouldn't be in your inbox.
If it comes from a known source (some person, retailer or mailing list that sends you mail more often than once every few months) it should be labeled automatically.
No one needs to look at their own inbox more than once an hour (and for many, once every 2-3 hours).
To borrow from the cult of GTD, re-factor constantly and mercilessly.

If you're a pack-rat at the core of your being -- or a control freak with organization issues -- you may be experiencing heart palpitations after reading the rules. It's ok, just breathe; I'm here to help you.

DLS readers are smart cookies and, being one of them, you've probably noticed a pattern among the rules. Your inbox should be empty.

"What?!", you exclaim, "That's impossible!"

True. The real world probably won't ever allow you to have a completely empty inbox. If it does, you're probably not busy enough. However, the empty inbox should be the ultimate goal. Think of it as the monster at the end of the final level of the incredibly popular video game that is Gmail. It my take time and patience to beat it, but the feeling of accomplishment when your inbox is clean (the the monster is slain) is unmistakable.

Let's go through the rules one by one and expand on them.

1. If you don't need to read it now, it shouldn't be in your inbox.

Listservs, newsletters, sales fliers, we get them all. They're a useful part of our work and social lives but, left to fester in your inbox, they are a horrid waste of productivity. Added to which they make easy procrastination bait.

The answer is simple, it's all in the labels. Create a label for each listserv you subscribe to, apply the labels with a filter, and auto-archive each message. I thought we all did this (then I saw my wife's Gmail inbox); Turns out, more of us than you'd think could use this simple bit of advice.

Tip: Instead of filtering your lists by subject, (i..e filtering for messages that contain "[downloadsquad]" in the subject) filter them by the To: (i.e. thelist@downloadsquad.com) field. This serves an additional purpose, if someone replies to you off-list, it will end up in your inbox, rather than being lost in the mess of a thread you're no longer following.

2. If you've already responded to it, it shouldn't be in your inbox.

When you respond to something, archive it. It will reappear when/if there is a reply. This can really help clear your head-space in your inbox. By which I mean; You'll find that the more diligent you are, and the "cleaner" your inbox becomes, the quicker you'll be able to decide what to do with each individual email you receive. Having less in your inbox to weed through pays you mental dividends, you'll notice this almost immediately.

This rule really comes down to a very simple and almost all encompassing directive : If it's been responded to or didn't need a response, it should be tagged and archived. Which brings us around to...

3. If it comes from a known source it should be labeled automatically.

Family is fantastic, and I love mine very much; I'd just prefer to deal with them outside of office hours. This is made doubly important for me since I work freelance, and use one email address for absolutely everything.

I created a label named family, and a filter for each of my relatives. For an extra level of mid-day ease, you can set your filter for each family member to archive automatically. The messages will still appear as unread, only they'll be found under the label you applied. When you're ready to check in with your family's favorite email memes and well wishes, they'll still be there.

You can do the same thing with all sorts of predictable mail. Amazon fliers, domain renewal notices, community newsletters; they all fit this rule well.

(Tip: For predictable mail you want to see immediately, create the same filter but don't set the "Archive it" flag. This will ensure that you still see it in your inbox, but also allow you to easily archive it without losing the message. )

No one needs to look at their inbox more than once an hour (and most of us once every 2-3 hours).

This is the hardest for me. I'm obsessive about checking my email (and, about everything else). If I let myself I can waste a half hour of my day just periodically looking at Gmail. The only way to get past this is, to make yourself trust the system. If you follow the rules really diligently, you'll find that it becomes easier to let your email "go" for a few hours at a time. Even when you do return to your inbox, your rules and filters will have done most of the mindless busywork for you, leaving you with emails that actually need your attention.

To borrow from the cult of GTD, re-factor constantly and mercilessly.

Any organization system is only as good as your persistence. For the rules I've laid out above to work for you continually, you must constantly be on the lookout for emails that get past your filters and into your inbox. Just like in Centipede, if they get past your front line defenses, you've already lost. Make sure you keep up the diligent work of creating new filters whenever something meets one of the above rules.

Easier email and, more of your own clock cycles to use any way you see fit. Who can beat that?

Tags: clutter, email, empty, filters, gmail, gtd, inbox, labels, organization, productivity

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

random_guy said 3:00PM on 11-15-2006

A noteworthy addition to the filtering of email. Gmail has a finite allowed number of filters. It can be advantageous (it is to me) to make e.g. a "newsletter" filter, as Gmail allows operators such as "OR" when creating filters.

So what I would suggest is make a filter called "newsletters" and when you receive newsletters that are not in the filter, simply add them to that filter. What I have done is created one where the "skip inbox" is checked off and the "From" field looks like this "newsletter@whatever.com OR newsletters@skipit.com OR ..." and I add an "OR new@newsletter.com" when one in not in the filter. Then also apply a label (e.g. "newsletter") and you're good to go. Within a month you will be unproductive free.

I have also other labels and corresponding filters, such as "community", "friends & family" (where skip inbox is not checked), "software updates" etc.. Choose what filters and labels make sense to you based on the how you read your email. (e.g. if it is more important to read your community emails than your newsletters, it would be logical to separate them with different labels/filters).

Grant Robertson said 3:37PM on 11-15-2006

I didn't know you could use OR in in your filters.. great tip Random_guy! Thanks!

Tomas said 6:45PM on 11-15-2006

I too hate having stuff in my inbox, but, since i'm a forgetful person, these things just don't work for me. I have this habbit of, if i can see some clutter, i try to get rid of it, so i found that, unless i need to do something with it, it gets archived, so the only things in my inbox are things that are relavant right now, or i need to remember to do something with sometime. If i can't see it though, i will forget it. Same goes with my desktop, the only thing on it is an icon to the hard drive. Things get added, like work, if i need to finish it, and since i hate clutter on my desktop, it forces me to do something with it, clean it up.

b.art said 8:13PM on 11-15-2006

1. What on earth were you doing in your wife's gmail?
2. Somebody ought to come up with similar rules for RSS. I've come to realise that browsing RSS does alot more to tax your productivity than it does to add to it. What's worse, most of us dont recieve rss content from our bosses or long lost friends, which is the case with email, so as productivity goes, the buck stops with you reading it.

ja said 1:36AM on 11-16-2006

"and that annoying inbox chime that dings"

This can be turned off by unchecking the 'Play a sound when a new message arrives' option. It's been that way for years now.

I haven't found that Gmail is any better or worse than Outlook.

random_guy said 9:52AM on 11-16-2006

[quote]I haven't found that Gmail is any better or worse than Outlook.[/quote]

No, Outlook is great. However, not portable, unless you bring your computer with you or have access to an exchange server with webaccess. Gmail has that, and a lot more storage, and can be used with basically ANY webbrowser there is.
But most importantly, Gmail and Outlook can work in harmony through POP3, and you can have the best of both worlds. Even in case of a complete HD failure, you can recover all mails in your Outlook as they are stored in your gmail account and can be imported again and again.

Top Ten Lists said 11:24AM on 11-16-2006

[...]Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox[...]

fak3r said 11:47AM on 11-16-2006

Thanks for this, I just started using Gmail fulltime after an outage on my home server, now all mail gets bounced to Gmail to see how I like it. The lack of 'folders' killed me, and not being able to clear out my INBOX (something that I think far too many people do) was really hindering my love of it; but I now see how 'filters' and archive are basically the same thing! Another thing a friend of mine did at work, under his INBOX he'd have a dir called fileit where he'd drop requests/projects that he's been pinged about, and replied to, but was waiting on a reply from the originator. This way if it sunk to the bottom of his fileit folder due to no communication, no bother cause he'd keep his INBOX clean.

This post helped me a ton already, thanks!

Monsters said 11:53AM on 11-16-2006

Nice generic explanation of the GTD inbox rules, totally valuable.

I have some GTD related stuff going on over here,
http://bigmojo.net/monsters/?cat=3

Enjoy

Frode Hegland said 11:58AM on 11-16-2006

Great tips. Regarding not checking email more than once an hour, I can recommend LiSA, which speaks with a human voice when you have mail, even saying who from: "You have a message from a client" or "You have a reply from your boss". http:///www.speakingassistant.com

LiSA works for Mac, Window and Linux and is one of the products supporting our Hyperwords project. Hope you like her! :-)

Green said 12:50PM on 11-16-2006

The number one time saving tip - for email inboxes and beyond: Learn keystroke/keyboard shortcuts! This might be obvious, but it bears repeating when discussing efficiency. After years and years of Eudora usage with dozens of filters, I finally forced myself to use the mouse less and keyboard shortcuts more. The results were amazing. I can process 300-400 incoming messages almost instantly, where my mouse driven activities had me spending 10-20 minutes every morning. Not exactly applicable to web based email, but on the desktop, shortcuts rule.

Manny said 1:01PM on 11-16-2006

I am relatively new to GTD and this post is a real "keeper". Thank you!! I also have been listening to some podcasts featuring David Allen. I mention them here:

http://successbooks.blogspot.com/2006/11/podcast-review-interviews-with-davd.html

kevin said 1:09PM on 11-16-2006

I use my everyday GMAIL account for storage. Maybe I should be pushing "valuable files" in another gmail account so i can keep my normal email acct empty?

Brian said 2:03PM on 11-16-2006

You should check out Bubbles, it has a nice Systray Icon for Gmail that will notify you if you have new messages. But also if you click on it opens your Gmail inbox. It is basically a web browser sitting in your Systray.
http://www.3d3r.com/bubbles/

Khobbits said 2:44PM on 11-16-2006

There are two tips I have to add to this, firstly remember you can filter on gmail email labels, so for example sign up to most newsletters with something like bob+newsletter@gmail.com and it will be delivered as normal to bob@gmail.com but you can set up a filter in the to box to intercept the email and label it.

The other advice is to use an external mail service such as spamgourmet where you can set up fake emails to forward email to your real email, helps filter out spam.

I take this label thing one step further, because I own my domain, I have set up gmail for my domain, meaning I have differn't emails going to differn't labels, such as newsletters@domain.com and I can have unlimited amounts of these emails, all being forwarded to my use all gmail account.

attobuoy said 2:54PM on 11-16-2006

I have a different style that works for me with Thunderbird and Comcast mail.

1) All incoming messages get downloaded but remain on the Comcast server for later portability unless I remove them from my inbox.

2) Junk mail gets filtered to the Thunderbird junk folder. I check later, retrieve anything wrongly labeled junk, delete the rest.

3) Messages of known topic or list go filtered, unread to folders set up for those topics or lists. I check periodically.

4) Anything unread in the inbox is then worth dealing with. I read it and deal with it. If I can't deal with it right then, I mark it unread and come back to it later.

5) Everything already read and dealt with remains in the inbox for later easy search.

6) I bcc myself to my inbox on every outgoing message. This helps later searches on a given subject line.

7) Eventually my Comcast server limit will be reached and I will archive half of the inbox to a local "Old mail" folder.

Like I say, it works for me, and doesn't feel cluttered. YMMV

Ian said 3:22PM on 11-16-2006

Or you could just use GMail Notifier.
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/index.html

Anders Borg said 3:27PM on 11-16-2006

An issue in itself is the volume of received e-mails (and I assume we are not talking spam here), and that's where I think you lack one very important advice: Simply stop the flood of messages, e.g.:
- don't sign up to any mailing lists, even if they are professional. Discussions are held in forums and via chat and phone calls, not via e-mail. Especially if you receive e-mails from discussions you just follow, there's every reason to cancel, as most mailing lists have archives.
- Switch to a phone call or text chat if there's need for a quick response or if there's risk for misunderstandings. In that case don't respond via e-mail except to summarize decisions.

Rick said 4:50PM on 11-16-2006

These are some great hints at keeping clean. The one that most people will have a problem with is the closing of your email and not checking it for a few hours.

I have two sets of accounts. My direct work using Outlook and then personal email using Opera. Opera has been using filters for much longer than Gmail so their filtering system is as good if not better (only said because they have been doing it longer, I do not have a gmail account.) The filtering method works very good versus the folder method in Outlook. It does come down to the same mechanics and what you get used to.

I handle 50 emails of business each day and about 500 spam a day and both styles (folders/filters) handle those level with ease. I change my rules everyday to accomodate new items.

Again, great list.

tevetorbes said 8:19PM on 11-16-2006

Seriously?

Not trying to start a flame-war here, but probably the most powerful feature of GMail is the Search functionality.

That being said, I just drop everything in my inbox (its a mess, and apparently all you guys with OCD would keel over if you saw it). Then, if I need to find something later, I just plop a search and *bam* its done.

So if you're really into GTD(TM), you don't have to waste any time setting up all this gobbety-gook: dump it all in the inbox and use Search when you need it.

This works great on a mac too- gogo Spotlight! :)

Just my 2 cents...

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