Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter

A couple of weeks ago, I got this comment on a post about my new productivity system:

“Can you extrapolate on bringing your inbox to zero? I like keeping emails around for proof I sent them, and lots more. Do you send them to gmails archive? If you do are they still search able? Is the archive laid out like an inbox, so the whole point in archiving would be when signing into gmail I see only new messages?”

That’s an excellent question, and one that I think deserves to be answered. Knowing how we can use email rather than be overwhelmed by it is a key step in conquering email, rather than having it be a constant source of stress like it is for most people.

Inbox Zero is a term coined by Merlin Mann of the great 43Folders blog, one of the godfathers of the whole “productivity lifestyle” phenomenon. He’s written more than a few great posts on the subject, and it’s definitely worth checking out.

(I’m essentially paraphrasing Mann here, and he defines IZ much better than I do) The whole idea of Inbox Zero is that your email inbox becomes just that: an inbox. It’s not a to-do list, or a place to hold reminders. It’s for incoming things that you then deal with and put into their rightful place within your productivity system.

You “process” everything, meaning you go through each email one time and do something with it. You either respond to it, file it, delete it, delegate it, or do whatever you need to with it. Email doesn’t live in your inbox – it just comes into it, and then goes where it’s really supposed to.

There are a bunch of reasons this is a good thing, the biggest one purely psychological: you just feel better when you don’t have things in your inbox. Just how it somehow feels better to have your desk clear, or a clean room, having an email inbox free from clutter has huge mental benefits.

Mental benefits aren’t the only ones, though: Inbox Zero means that your to-do list is your to-do list, and that you don’t have to check multiple places to find out what you need to be dealing with. It also means that, once you’re at Zero, you’ve dealt with every piece of email, and you don’t need to be wasting time going back through old email to make sure you’re not missing something.

Inbox Zero is one of the most time- and sanity-saving habit I’ve ever come across. Here’s how I get to Zero:

• Process once a day Emails don’t live in my inbox for more than 24 hours. Once a day, usually right before I go to bed, I go through and process all of my email, until I have none left.
• The Two Minute rule If an email is in my inbox that takes two minutes or less to reply to, I just respond. I’m constantly amazed by the number of emails that only take two minutes, and most of my processing happens with this rule.
• Have a place to put emails If an email requires thought beyond two minutes, it goes into one of two places. If I have to respond at a particular time, or the email is relevant to a particular time, it goes into my calendar. Otherwise, it goes onto my task list. Then, I can do the research or write a lengthy reply when I’m getting my real work done.
• Search Most productivity “experts” say that you have to be ruthless in your deleting of emails. But particularly with Gmail, there’s so much space, why delete? I just archive everything, and that way it’s always accessible through Gmail’s awesome search.

As The Office’s Michael Scott would say, “A cluttered inbox means a cluttered mind. An empty inbox means… an empty mind.” Empty may not be the goal, but uncluttered and systemized are good ones to shoot for. Inbox Zero’s perfect for that.