Inbox Zero, it’s not wishful thinking, it’s really not hard even.

After a bit of thought and a bit of research into (which meant I asked a few people in the office) why people can’t manage email, the solution seems to be so simple that when I mention it to people they seem to shrug and say “my system works okay”. But then they are the people who often fail to notice a message or fail to do their part in responding to the message. So here are my 3 tips to having an inbox you can faithfully manage yourself.

Unsubscribe. Your inbox is for things you think are important enough to read. Medium’s daily digest is right up there on mine. Sometimes someone else thinks your attention to them is important too. When you have a different of opinion on this matter you unsubscribe. Thinkgeek lost me last christmas season when they started sending daily emails. I liked them, but weekly was about my limit for them. Shame. I’ll look up the site occasionally, but I’m sure I’ll miss some products that don’t last long.

Archive. Your inbox is not your endbox or your foreverbox. It’s called an inbox for a reason. Personally I use it as a todo list, or a list of the top items I don’t want to figure out a good place to file them. There’s 14 items in my work inbox, 5 are active projects, 9 are things I want to look at occasionally or often enough that I need them to stay in my consciousness at THAT level. My personal inbox has 18 items.

Filters. This is for the very rare occasion that I’m subscribed to a big list, where a large chunk of the messages are important for my job and the rest are nigh useless and realistically just in the way. The spam filter counts here, but it’s amazingly automatic thanks to Google’s efforts in redefining how spam filters work when they wrote gmail.

“But how can I manage to keep your mailbox so light with just those three rules?”

The answer is “decisions.” I make a decision after I’ve read it and before I’ve clicked anything else that varies between those three rules.

Is it something I need to actively do later, whether that’s write a response, or do some work, then it stays in my inbox and I simply close the message. Sometimes the work needed is short enough that I immediate do it. “Thanks!” Well now that message falls right into rule 2, archive. I’m done with the message, I don’t need it anymore, it would be unusual if I were to follow up on my message again, so the whole conversation gets archived and if I need to refer to it again, or if I need to add more to it, it’s still in the archive for me to search on later.

Is the act of reading the message enough? Maybe it’s Medium, and today there aren’t any articles I’m interested in spending the time to read, then it gets immediately archived. Is there something there that looks like I want to read it, but not right now because I’m next in the lunch line, close it and since its in my inbox, next time I’m in my email I’ll see it and be reminded that I wanted to read that! Read the story, then archive the email.

Okay look, sometimes your favorite retailer gets a bit desperate for sales. Maybe they just got purchased and have some new unreasonable goals that some random suit just forced upon them. So they start sending too many emails. They know better, they know the risk of alienating their fans, but they do it anyway, and at some point you feel like it’s too much. And that’s when you reluctantly open that email and the decision has made itself, you’re looking for the unsubscribe link. You wouldn’t keep garbage in your house (I hope), don’t leave it in your inbox, it’s done, archive it.

You make decisions all day long, deciding every time you are done with an email is not a hard decision when your decision is between having it immediately entangled with everything going on in your life, or to move it out of the current events into history, archived and still there, ready to be actively searched for when and if you ever need it. Don’t clutter up your consciousness, house, and life with the remnants of history, archive it. That’s the real secret. It doesn’t go away, it just gets out of your way, and makes room for important things that are actively current, that you want to keep around and that are important to you right now. It’s not something you do once a year, it’s something you live in, every day, multiple times per day, you’re at the list, with an opportunity to deal with things you want to deal with, just get it over with already. It’s not difficult, it doesn’t require any tricks, or tools, it just takes a bit of prioritization and doesn’t even take any additional time to doing what you already do.

That way you end up with an elegant start to your day, when you open up your inbox and can legitimately say you’re on top of it. Then you just have to deal with your anxiety when you see someone else’s trainwreck of an inbox. Yeah, that bugs me too.