My Zero Inbox Method
Email is one of those things that can easily overwhelm if not managed well. As with much of what I talk about in this blog, this is a challenge that occupies us in both the office and at home. Given that we are getting ever more emails, it’s well worth thinking through how you stay on top of them and ensure they don’t pile up in your inbox.
Treat emails as tasks
Now something to note right away. Dealing and responding to emails is often a huge and integral part of many professional jobs. The nature of those emails will be wide and varied, but if you are doing a sales-like job like me, then actually contacting and responding to people is what the job actually is. Often, writing or replying to an email is an important task just like any other and so needs to be scheduled properly. The response to the email itself (say a request for a proposal) may involve many other sub-tasks, and you will have to track and schedule all those in your task management system, whatever you have chosen it to be.
Zero Inbox
There are many different methods to managing email, and you may well have a good system that works for you. The one I use has been honed over a couple of years and has allowed me to easily maintain an empty inbox (or Zero Inbox, to use the jargon) and a searchable archive. Frankly, there is nothing worse than a giant inbox full of all kinds of correspondence, newsletters, unread email, spam, etc. The best inbox is an empty one! It may be too simple for you, and that’s fine, but it’s a good place to start.
Setting up Zero Inbox in Outlook
My system involves having just three email folders: your Inbox, a ‘Reference’ folder used to hold emails that you are going to deal with in the short term, and the ‘Archive’, which holds all emails you are finished with. Most modern Outlook installations already have an ‘Archive’, but if not then you can just create one.
To set up this system in Outlook, start off by doing the following steps. You can create a similar arrangement in most email applications, whether web-based or on the desktop.
1. Turn off email notifications so you avoid the distraction of emails arriving. The trouble with having notifications is that you can easily get distracted and end up reading some email while you are in the middle of doing other important work (which you have already scheduled in your calendar!).
2. Create a ‘Reference’ folder under your Inbox. If your Inbox isn’t currently empty, archive anything older than a month and move everything else into Reference.
3. Create a Quick Action called ‘Reference’ which will move emails to your newly created Reference folder. If you haven’t used Quick Actions before in Outlook, they are a way of creating a shortcut for a series of actions, such as moving an email to a particular folder, flagging it, etc.
4. Create a series of Quick Actions called ‘Flag & Reference (Today/Tomorrow/This Week/Next Week)’ which will move emails to your newly created Reference folder and also flag them for follow up by a particular date.
Processing your inbox
At regular points during the day (how often depends on your volume of email), you should go through every single email that has arrived in your inbox, one by one (resist the urge to jump to interesting looking ones) and process them in turn.
The purpose of this ‘processing’ is to empty the inbox, not necessarily to read and complete all the tasks the emails involve.
Emails that need an action that you can do immediately, e.g., less than 2 mins
Do it right away, then archive the email. If you think you might have to refer to the email in the next couple of days, then move it to your Reference folder instead (the Quick Action you created will let you do this in one click).
Emails that need an action that will take longer, so you need to schedule time to do it
Flag it for follow up and move it to your Reference folder. Flagging the email will make it show up in your task list, so you can schedule it and mark it completed just like any other task.
Emails that you will need to read through properly to decide whether there is an action, etc
Same as above.
Emails that don’t need an action but hold useful information that you might want to refer to soon
Move it to your Reference folder. If you want to make time to read it again, flag it as well.
Emails that don’t need an action and don’t hold information that needs your attention
Archive or delete the email.
Once finished, your inbox will be empty, and all emails will be in your Reference or Archive folders or deleted. Anything you need to follow up on will also be in your task list. As we’ve previously talked about, you can then drag and drop these tasks onto your calendar to book time for actually doing them.
The ‘real world’ analogy for all this is that the Inbox is your in-tray/mailbox, the Reference folder is your bag/briefcase/working folder, while Archive is your filing cabinet. The first should be empty, the second should have just the things you need, and the third everything else. (And yes, there’s a rubbish/recycle bin as well…obviously!).