Getting to Inbox Zero

Some tricks to help reduce your email noise

My old boss introduced me to Inbox Zero (i.e. keeping a clean inbox). For him, a person who received 100s of emails a day, it was an effort to keep his inbox clean, but one that he used so that he never missed a useful piece of information. I’ll share what he and others taught me to manage our inboxes.

Archive, Never Delete!

He said the number one rule is to “archive, never delete!” You don’t want to accidentally delete an email that you actually needed, since getting them back is not exactly a straightforward process. And storage is cheap, so why save the pennies deleting emails when you can just archive them?

Archiving moves them out of your inbox, but lets you search for them later, especially if you remember to…

Crack Out the Labels

This is pretty basic, but I label emails that I’m going to look at later, like travel itineraries, or making sure returns I sent went through. When I no longer care about the email, I’ll go back in to the label view and drop the label.

But you might say “inbox zero is impossible, I get too many emails!” To that I say —

Unsubscribe Religiously

Most emails have an unsubscribe button at the bottom of them (or with Gmail, sometimes it’s right next to the sender, as shown above). If you get an email that you don’t want, it’s time to unsubscribe!