Good Morning! I said I’d write a twitter thread about inbox zero, but it was kinda too long for one, so instead it’s a blog post. Here we go, I wrote this mostly as I worked on getting back to inbox zero yesterday.
I just got back from 4 days of vacation, and I had let everyone know I would be on vacation, so I didn’t get as many emails as normal (and outlook tells other people in your org that you’re on vacation before they send you an email). Thankfully I only had around 200 emails to go through.
I did hit inbox zero before I left for vacation, that lasted about 5 minutes. But I didn’t want to be checking my email constantly. I did checked it twice to make sure nothing urgent came in, and I responded to the one super urgent email I had.
So, here’s how I got back to inbox zero.
Ground Rules
- the inbox is a to-do list, but not the only to-do list
- you don’t need to be on as many listservs as you think, and if there’s a daily, or better weekly, digest for it you should be using that
- if you’ve dealt with an email it gets filed
- dealt with means that you have no current actions for it
- if you’re waiting on a response via email it’s dealt with
- if you added it to your formal to-do list it’s dealt with
- nested folders are your friend
- only have folders you use a lot