Zero Inbox

This is a method of organization that uses your email inbox as a to-do list. I use this in a work context, but not in my private life. My work inbox generally has fewer than ten emails in it, my personal inbox has a few hundred, and I have about eight personal email addresses.

This isn't a technique that I'd recommend using in every aspect of your online life, but if you have an email address that you use as sort of a "command center" - one that you have attached to bills and banking and insurance - it's a good candidate for zero inbox.

Step-By-Step

• Clear some time in your schedule to go through your inbox. Depending on your backlog, this may be a few hours.
• Make a first pass deleting junk mail and things you aren't going to read. This may be newsletters, or promotions, or payment statements from your car insurance. This is stuff that you don't need to have a record of. In order to make this process faster, you may want to sort your inbox by the word "unsubscribe" or by the names of newsletters or billing agencies. Select large chunks of emails and delete them all at once.
• As you are deleting the junk, take note of the types of mail you see interspersed between the junk, and make a list of categories. Maybe you go to the vet a lot and need a record of your pet's visits, maybe you are planning a wedding and have a lot of vendor communications. Don't do anything with that information yet, keep weeding out the junk but make notes about broad categories between the junk.
• Once the junk is deleted, create folders based on the categories you made notes on, for instance, Vet emails.
• Now, search your inbox for your vet's name, select all of the emails that come up, and move them into your new vet folder.
• Repeat this process with anything else that needs it. You can make folders for specific friends, or projects, or bills. You can organize it however you want, it's your inbox and nobody is going to judge you for it. My work inbox has categories split up by vendors, purchase orders, website maintenance, and a folder of projects with subfolders by customer.
• Once you've got a manageable number of emails in your inbox, try to stay at that number or try to get to zero by sorting incoming emails and removing old emails once the contents have been handled.

Why It Works

I find this method effective because it means that I need to handle every email that comes into my mailbox and I need to know what the contents are and whether they require action on my part before they can be sorted. This is great for my work email because those emails often require action. If I get an email from a vendor I need to enter the PO number and the tracking data into a spreadsheet before I can sort it into the vendor folder. If I have an email from a customer, I may need to get them a quote or answer a question before the email can be deleted.

Keeping the inbox at zero emails is a challenge and it requires me to stay on top of my work correspondence; if I start getting too many emails in my main inbox it means that I need to buckle down and focus to clear it up. It works both as a list of the things that I need to do as well as an early warning system to let me know if I'm getting swamped. It also lets me know when something is dead weight. If I never read emails from a particular newsletter, I can unsubscribe. If I've been assigned to a list that sends me information that doesn't apply to me, I can create a filter and check that list once a week instead of letting it clutter up my inbox.