Over the years, I've developed a pretty nice routine that helps me maintain the elusive inbox zero, and wanted to share some tips that have helped me.
Schedule Your Inbox Time
The first tip is to stop passively checking your inbox throughout the day. And definitely turn off notifications.
Setting aside one to three specific times during the day for email helps you manage your inbox a lot more efficiently, and leaves more time to focus on other tasks.
Getting into a state of focus can take between 5 and 15 minutes, depending on various factors, and deep focus can generally only be maintained for about 90 minutes, according to Andrew Huberman. By repeatedly checking your inbox throughout the day you're constantly interrupting focus and forcing yourself to start over at the "ramp up" phase.
If you check your inbox at 9am and clean it out, as far as you know it's empty until the next time you check it. Don't waste brain power that you could be using to get work done, by worrying about your inbox having mail.
Set Up Filters
Setting up different rules and filters for incoming mail is a great way to keep things organized. Not everything even needs to hit your inbox. You can do things like "archive all shopping emails and give them the label of Shopping." Then when you're interested in looking for any deals you can go through your unread Shopping emails.
Take Advantage of Gmail’s Plus Addressing
If you use Gmail you get access to a really useful utility. You can create unique emails simply by appending +alias to your username. For example, my email address is zach@zachpatrick.com, and I have an alias I use a lot that is zach+archive@zachpatrick.com. I also have a filter setup that immediately archives any email that is sent to this address.
Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts is so much more efficient than clicking with your mouse. I use keyboard shortcuts to quickly archive mail, snooze mail for later, and more.
Snooze Emails Until Later
The unsung hero of inbox zero is the snooze button. When you're working through your email, the goal is inbox zero. Oftentimes, however, there are emails that you're not ready to take action on yet. It's tempting to just leave those emails in the inbox so they maintain visibility and you don't forget about them. But this can easily snowball and before long you have hundreds of emails in your inbox because "what's the point in archiving? It's already full."
The snooze button helps you avoid this. As you're cleaning out your inbox and you come across an email that you're not ready to deal with yet, don't just leave it in your inbox, snooze it! Ideally, snooze it for a time you'll be ready to tackle it, but if you're unsure when you'll be ready, snooze for a day, two days, a week, etc.
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Like anything else, the virtual mailbox can be mastered. It just takes some intentionality.