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Instrumental behaviour: Inbox zero - A guide

4 Elo 12 January 2016 07:28AM

This will be brief.

Inbox zero is a valuable thing to maintain.  Roughly promoted around the web as having an empty inbox.

An email inbox collects a few things:

  • junk
  • automatic mail sent to you
  • personal mail sent to you
  • work sent to you
  • (maybe - work you send to yourself because that's the best way to store information for now)
An inbox is a way to keep track of "how much I have to do yet".  Because of this; it's incredibly valuable to try to get to inbox zero.

This guide is for anyone with bajillions of emails in their inbox, some read; some not.  If you have an email system in place; don't change it.  if not - get one.  (maybe not this one - but do it).


0. decide that this is a good idea (this can be done after) but mostly I want to say - don't half-arse this, you might end up in a no-mans-land between the old and the new.

1. A program.  
I recommend Thunderbird because it's free.  I used to work in a webmail system but the speed of webmail is a joke in comparison to local mail.  also offline-powers are handy from time to time.  (Disadvantage - not always having backups for everything)

2. Archive system
This being January 2016 we are going to make a few main folders.  
  • Old as all hell (or other friendly name)
  • 2014
  • 2015
  • 2016
Anything older than 2014 will probably never get looked at again; (just ask any email veteran) That's okay - that's what archives are for.

3. Old
Put anything old into the old folder

4. 2014
That was two years ago!  it will also go the same way as old-as-all-hell, but for now it can sit in 2014.

5. 2015
two options here - either:
a. leave them in your inbox and through the year sort them into the 2015 folder; remembering that things that old should go to sleep easy.
b. put them in 2015 where you can look at them when you need them.

6. 2016
There are a few simple behaviours that make the ongoing use of the system handy.
a. if you read a thing, and you have no more to do with it; file it away into 2016
b. if you read a thing and still have more to do; leave it in the inbox (If you can resolve it in under 5 minutes; try to do it now)
c. if you don't plan to read a thing AND it's not important AND you don't want to delete it; I strongly advise unsubscribing from the source; finding a way to stop them from coming in, or setting up a rule to auto-sort into a folder.
d.  Every automatically generated email has an unsubscribe button at the bottom.  If you have a one-time unsubscribe policy you will never have to see the same junk twice.
e. do some work; answer emails; send other emails etc.  and file things as you go.

7. other email folders
sure sometimes things need a bit of preserving; sometimes things need sorting - go ahead and do that.  Don't let me stop you.



Using this fairly ordinary system I can get my total email time down to about half an hour a week.

Don't like it? find a better system.  But don't leave them all there.

Final note: I have an email address for things I subscribe to that is separate to the email address I give out or use; this way I can check my subscriptions quickly without mixing them up with work/life/important things.

This post came out of a discussion in the IRC.  It took 30mins to write and is probably full of errors and in need of improving; this was written with no research and there are likely better systems in existence.  It partially incorporates a "Getting Things Done" attitude but I might post more about that soon.

Feel free to share your system in the comments, or suggest improvements.

Other posts I have written can be found in my Table of contents
Comments (12)

Making the chaff invisible, and getting the wheat ($200 prize too)

1 diegocaleiro 29 November 2013 01:19AM

The title is the best name I could come up for a problem I have had for years, and have been waiting for someone else to come up with a solution. 

There is a lot of awesome content on the web. Some of it is about events you could be at, right now, that you really want to be at, and could. If only you knew. 

An example: I think Roger Waters is one of the most brilliant people alive, and I would like to witness every single concert of his, every time he is less than 100km away from me. Yet, I have only been to two of those, because I was only notified of those. 

So I wish I could know if events I love are taking place. But I do not want to know about Meetups not even close to where I live. And I don't want to know at what time Roger went to the toilet, or if his T-shirt collection for groupies is out, or anything else that people responsible for his (hipothetical) rss feed or email list want me to buy. 

Two questions are relevant here:

1) How can you in general have access to the information you want about events, without drowning in an information ocean or getting web addicted. 

2) Do you know ways to get access to info about events, in particular of the following kinds that I happen to want to be notified?  (in SF bay or in some city independent way)

 

  • Ecstatic Dance
  • Roger Waters, Deep Purple, Guns, Royksöpp, Evanescence, The Coors.   
  • Legacy and Vintage MTG
  • Intellectual stars lectures
  • CFAR/MIRI/Leverage/CEA/FHI/GWWC/80000k/IERFH/SENS/THINK etc... hosted events
  • Crazy parties (crazy ranging over what would interest Iron Man's character or Jimmy Hendrix)
  • Video Games Live (orchestra)
  • Pop stars of the past - Psy, Britney, Backstreet, Madonna etc...
  • Ultimate Frisbee
  • Coursera courses
  • Hiking expeditions
  • Awesome nature documentaries (Life, Frozen Planet etc...)

 

Feel free to post your own interests in the comments. 

Here is how I noticed the problem: Looking back into my life I began wondering what were the main determinants of whether I did or not go to some kinds of events. And again and again the result was "because I had a friend who used to tell me about that kind of thing back then". 

Even now, most of what I do is basically determined by other people's tastes. It's simple. I've locked all possible advertisement away - I'm a serious anti-ad freak, it takes me less than half a second to switch radio stations if a person talks instead of music playing, and I block the front chair video away in airplanes in which it can't be turned off, I feel pain when any advertisement reaches my senses - but I did not block people away (yeah, I don't punch people's faces when they tell me about cool future events). So I'm left with the intersection between what interests me, and what interests them enough that they tell me about it. 

This can't be right. The alternative, having to, as they say at MIT, drink from a fire hose, doesn't sound any good either.   

Yep, it's in MIT

One of the things people say to startup minded people is that they should start by noticing a need they have, something they'd be willing to pay for, and create something to satisfy that need. I'm usually not eager to pay for stuff, but here is something I'd pay for:

I'd be happy to pay $200 to someone who solved this problem somehow. Pointing an app, creating a system, summoning a submissive gnome... I don't mind. As long as there was a way for someone to get news of things they care about without having their brains stung by the atrocities of voracious marketeer capitalist addiction systems. And I don't think I'm the only anti-ad freak out there who'd pay some money for this, ADblock is, after all, the most used browser app in the world. 

It is basically the reverse of the Groupon concept. Instead of stealing your attention to make you more interested in things you don't need and causing you to feel an emotional void for not having things while your pocket empties as well - yeah, I really don't like ads - the idea would be to inform you of things you already think you need, giving you a warm feeling inside of being served of all those delicious potential hedons you've been eagerly waiting to purchase. 

I'm no entrepreneur, so who's up? 

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