Get to inbox zero every day
Achieving daily email nirvana in three steps
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One day last month, I took about 20 hours off from my email. I knew I’d regret it the next morning.
And boy was I right. I came back to an absolute slew of messages, 121 to be exact:
When I posted that picture to social media, the reaction was swift—and not the sympathy I’d hoped for.
“How do you only have 121 unread emails?”
“Quit complaining! I have 6000.”
“Lucky you, only 121!”
When I told the first person that 121 was a lot for me, when I told them that I get to inbox zero twice a day, they told me that was impossible.
…and, since I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write about this month anyway, I guess we’re talking about email today.
Your to-do list
Let me start by admitting that every single unread notification on my phone stresses me out. Those little red bubbles with numbers inside? Pure evil. Pure anxiety.
So I’ll be the first to admit that what I’m writing about here is, at its most fundamental, a well organized defense mechanism. An armadillo armor designed to protect me from the hit of bad neurotransmitters that accompanies every inbox ping.
The red bubbles stress me out because, honestly, email isn’t what it used to be. It’s evolved beyond being a neutral means of communication, a modern version of the nineteenth-century hand-written letter. Instead, your twenty-first–century inbox has become a to-do list.
And the worst part? It’s a to-do list that other people get to add to.
Read that again: your inbox is a list of tasks, a list that you have to tackle, but that anyone, anywhere, can add to, without your permission.
And you can’t stop it. You are literally powerless to stem the flow. Your storefront is always open. No working hours on the door; no crying uncle; no “Hold on, this is my to-do list; stop adding things!”
Anyone—from your boss to your mother to the definitely-real crypto dude who urgently needs your banking information—can send you an email, can add a task. At any time.
Since you can’t stop the firehose, you’ve only got two choices. You could ignore it, but that’s how you get to this:
Or you can take control of it.
And that’s what the rest of this post is about. Three steps to get control of your email. Three steps to get to inbox zero every single day.
Step 1: Clear the inbox
The first cut is the deepest. A few times a year, a colleague will ask me about email management. Almost every one of them balks at the first step. That’s because it feels impossible, even if it’s desperately simple:
Delete every unread email older than 30 days.
Easy, right?
“But what if there’s something important?”
There isn’t. I promise.
Chances are, if an email was important, you would already have read it. It wouldn’t be sitting in your inbox, unread. The fact that you’ve left it alone is itself a decently strong signal that you didn’t think it was important in the first place.
So delete it.
The second cut: Once you’ve deleted all your old unread emails, archive every single read email that’s older than 30 days. (If deleting unread emails bothers you, you can also mark all of them as read, and then archive everything over amonth old).
However you do it, the goal of Step 1 is to get your inbox to a manageable size. Get the chaff out of there.
I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t suck. Surgery hurts. But it’s worth it.
So, go do it. Cut off the email tumor. I’ll be here when you get back.
Step 2: Turn off those infernal notifications
It goes without saying: we’re addicted to notifications. Every time our phones ping, our brains grace us with a surge of dopamine. And, well…we like dopamine.
The addiction to email notifications is mercifully easier to break than other phone addictions. Because, unlike a like or a retweet, we actually don’t enjoy most email notifications. After all, how would you feel if your boss called you every time they had a new assignment for you? You’d immediately turn off your ringer.
So, shut off those email notifications. You don’t need them.
Your friends and loved ones aren’t emailing you anyway.
Step 3: Invoke the sorting hat
Now that you’ve excised the tumor, and now that you’ve broken the hate-ping cycle, it’s time set up safeguards so that the tumor never comes back.
Even better: it’s time to get you to inbox zero every single day.
To do that, you need a sorting hat, a triage system. Thankfully, this one’s pretty easy, because every single email falls into one—and only one—of four—and only four—categories:
- Delete
- Defer
- Delegate
- Deal with
That’s it. You’ll never get an email that doesn’t fit one of the four Ds.
Delete
The good news is, most emails fall into this category. Start your day by deleting them.
You already know which emails these are. They’re from H&M announcing this week’s new styles. They’re from Shutterfly, even though you’ve tried to unsubscribe a dozen times. They’re from your university, prophesying the demise of all higher education if you don’t open your wallet.
Unless you’re actually in the market for fast fashion or an aluminum portrait of your cat, delete these messages immediately (even better: unsubscribe from them, and then delete them).
Be ruthless. If you’re not actively in the market for five colors of the same shirt, then that task of your list. Send it to the trash.
You can be sure H&M will remind you tomorrow anyway.
Defer
Ok, but what if you did want to buy an aluminum portrait of your cat, but you don’t get paid till Friday?
You can still get that task out of your inbox by deferring it till later. There are three ways to do this:
Gmail: If you use Gmail, forward the email to yourself, but schedule-send it for Friday morning. Do that by clicking the upward-pointing triangle right next to the “Send” button, and set a return date.
Outlook: Outlook makes this even easier. They provide a Snooze function, which automatically removes the email from your inbox and sends it back to you whenever you decide. The Snooze function is right up at the top of your browser, in the ribbon that includes flagging, pinning, and archiving an email.
Boomerang: Ages ago, the folks at Baydin developed Boomerang. Since I primarily use Gmail (which hasn’t caught up on the Snooze game), Boomerang replaces it.
It’s unfortunately not free. (The link above is not an affiliate link. I get no kickbacks from Boomerang.)
However you do it, defer the email to when you know you can deal with it. And make your email platform do the remembering work for you. By snoozing / boomeranging / schedule-forwarding an email, you don’t have to keep Friday in your mind. Your task list will automatically remind you—and as a side effect, the email is no longer in your inbox.
In other words, you take back your agency: you decide that a) you do actually want the pet portrait on your to-do list, but b) not today. You’ll deal with it on Friday.
Delegate
Every time Jonathan sends an email that, in all honesty, should have gone to Madeline, people pleasers (hello!) are tempted to deal with it themselves. “I’ll just do Madeline a favor. She’s got enough on her plate anyway.”
Sometimes, that’s exactly the right thing to do.
But only sometimes.
As much as it offends the people pleaser inside of you, you’ve always got the choice to send that task on to the most appropriate recipient.
And you should. Honestly. Unless you actively have to deal with something, get that task off your to-do list.
On the other hand, if you do want to deal with it, then:
Deal with it
Once you’ve triaged everything else, I’d wager you’ll only have 10–20% of your original emails left.
And you’ll have the time to deal with them. You’ve freed up your inbox, your mental space, and your schedule.
Now that your inbox is manageable, tackle it. Do the tasks. Complete them, and then archive the email. Get it off your to-do list.
Then shut off of your email until next time.
And that’s it.
Depending on how bad the day is, I can get hundreds of tasks in my inbox over a single 24-hour period. I’m pretty regimented about dealing with them: I set aside 45 minutes every morning and every evening to manage my publicly accessible honey-do list.
The thing is, it rarely takes all 45 minutes. By expeditiously triaging the tasks people toss into my inbox, I’m usually at inbox zero in half an hour. And by time-blocking my email into just morning and evening, I don’t have to deal with the added stress of seeing new tasks pop up on my phone.
Honestly, it’s that simple.
Though I’m going to end this post here, there’s a lot more you can do to make the mail platforms work in your favor, a lot more options for making the sorting hat ever more efficient.
Meanwhile, let me know if this post was helpful, and if you’d be interested in another one.
And may you gaze on this beauty very soon:
