Inbox Zero — Day 3. On the go
In our previous article, we focused on how you prioritize your inbox. We described a methodology where you decide for each of your emails what action to take: delete, archive, reply & archive, snooze or delegate.
Lost time
Maybe you’re commuting to work every day? Or you have to wait from time to time (e.g., before a next meeting starts) and have a few minutes to spare? It might be a good opportunity to use this lost time to start prioritizing your inbox on your mobile phone.
In this article we’ll give some tips & tricks how to do so. We’re using the default mail app on iOS as an example in this article, but your email app of preference should work as well.
Prioritize
The process of prioritizing your inbox is in essence identical to what we described in our previous article:
- Delete emails that do not require any action and that are not worth of keeping.
- Archive emails that do not require any action but are important to keep for future reference.
- Immediately reply & archive emails that require a brief response of just a couple of words. It a reply requires more text, you’re better off snoozing your email so that you can write the reply once you’re back behind your desk.
- Snooze emails that require action but take some more time. You can snooze an email on your mobile phone by moving the email to one of the Tasks in a Box #snooze folders.
Swipe left or right
To speed up the process of going through your emails, swipe gestures are your friend. In the default mail app on iOS, you can configure the actions that are associated with a left or right swipe. Associate the most used actions to make prioritizing your mails a breeze. Other mail apps might support configurable swipe actions as well.
To set this up on iOS, you can do the following:
- Open the Settings app
- Tap Mail
- Tap Swipe Options
- Configure the Swipe Left option to the action Move Message. This allows you to quickly snooze an email by moving it to one of the #snooze folders.
- Configure the Swipe Right option to the action Archive. This allows you to quickly archive your message.
Once you’ve setup the swipe options, archiving and snoozing emails become as easy as swiping left and right!
Takeaways
Take advantage of any lost time that you might have to start prioritizing your inbox. Configure swipe gestures to speed up the process.
What’s next?
In our next article, we’re going to discuss the importance of focus time for your email.
