I don’t understand how people let their inbox become something they don’t want to deal with. Every message that ends up in my mail (excluding the spam gmail outstandingly filters) is a message I will likely want or need to read. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Then once I’ve read it, if I have to do something about it, it stays in my inbox, and if I don’t have to do anything with it, it gets archived. out of the 14 messages in my work inbox, 9 of them are more than a month old and stuff I think are important enough that I want to have a space for it until further notice, like the list of company holidays for the year. the 5 that are not, are current or upcoming projects that I will need to deal with sometime in the next few weeks.

Sure there are occasional newsletters, but I open and peruse over them immediately. If there’s a product from one of the few stores that I allow to send me those promotions that I want to look at later, I’ll keep it in my inbox and usually look before the end of the day, or I’ll go look at the website and make an immediate decision if I need that in my life. Then when I close that browser tab I immediately archive that email.

Inbox zero is not difficult if you immediately deal with stuff that’s in there…. Ah look there’s Eat Club telling me I need to order lunch today. Gotta run, there’s an immediate decision to be made.