Until I started working full-time, nearly three years ago, email was merely a means to exchange study material and a medium to correspond with friends (a dull, insipid alternative to physical letters, which I love. But more on that is a separate post). The idea of ‘managing email’ was alien to me.

Then my first job happened and soon enough started the never-ending influx of work mail. For a while it was manageable. But in my second role, as EA to the CEO, I managed not just my own email but also my boss’s. With every unread email, my anxiety grew. I became that person who hated email. I complained and whined about it to my friends. I felt unproductive, constantly dissatisfied with my day’s work. There were days when I’d clear my inbox, walk to the coffee machine and back, to find 25 new emails sitting there waiting for me to lose my mind. 25 emails in less than 5 minutes! There were days when I was convinced that all I had done was check and reply to my emails. Coming back from a holiday made me sad not just because my holiday was over but because it also meant a LOT of email in my inbox. Mornings filled me with a sense of dread I hadn’t felt before and pings on my phone meant high levels of cortisol in my body.

At this point, overwhelmed and defeated, I did what any respectable person of my generation would do. I googled. A lot. I started reading up on how other people managed. I sure cannot be alone, I thought. I found a lot of content. Some great, some well-meaning but useless (you cannot check your email only thrice a day if you work for a startup) and some mere click-bait. There’s a reason why so much is written about these things. There’s a reason why 112K people follow ‘Productivity’ on Medium. We all want to be more ‘on top of things’, more in control of our lives. But the thing with productivity is, it’s tough to find genuinely good content and even tougher to ignore anything on the subject. I’ve cut down on reading on this topic to a great extent as most of it is of the ‘popular’ variety, written with click-baity headlines (I’m looking at you Medium) and all the right keywords but not really adding anything to what I already know.

But I digress. Most people either get overwhelmed with email and hate it (like I did at one point) or they simply ignore emails (we all have that one person in office who doesn’t read emails right?)

The best way to tackle email is to stop fighting it. If you’re racing to get to fewer unread emails, you’re doing it wrong. Recognise what works for you and what doesn’t. What works for someone else might not work for you.

Before I tell you what worked for me, I’ll take you through my journey to getting to Inbox Zero, one failed effort after another. I use Gmail so all the following information is about/around it. But I’m sure most of the things I’ve listed can apply to other mail clients as well.

Failed attempt #1 — Folders

How do I organise stuff in real life? Folders, of course. It seemed like a no brainer. I was sure folders were the key to better email management. I have never been so wrong. I know a lot of people who ONLY use folders to organise their email and they do a great job of it. It works really well for them. But not for me, I tried and I tried. I realised, for me, out of sight was out of mind. If I had to take an action on an email, it would have to be in front of me and not hiding in some folder. I still use folders but more on that later.

Failed attempt #2 — Labels

Labels are great. But use them for too many things and your inbox will end up looking like a rainbow. Mine did.

I figured I couldn’t organise everything using labels because it would defeat their purpose of being able to find stuff easily.

Failed attempt #3 — Unread First

This inbox style divides your inbox into two parts, unread emails and everything else. This worked well at the very start. I would mark anything I had to work on as unread. But this soon got out of hand. I ended up having too many unread messages and things became chaotic. I also lived with a constant fear of having marked something read by mistake or having forgotten to mark something unread. This style works a lot better for my personal email where unread emails are usually at a minimum.

Failed attempt #4 — Starred First

This is a fairly common inbox style and it does work for a lot of people. While this style did not pose the danger of marking something unread, the issue of too many mails at the top of my inbox still remained unaddressed.

Failed attempt #5 — Priority Inbox with Outlook View

I tried the Preview Pane feature (available under Settings > Labs) with vertical split in conjunction with Priority Inbox. I configured it to split my inbox into three sections — unread, starred and everything else; and helped me view it in the Outlook format. This was a complete disaster. It was very easy for an email to get marked read in the Outlook view. There was too little space on the left side so subject lines were cropped and in general my inbox looked clumsy.

Eureka, at last! — Multiple Inboxes

This inbox style worked like a charm. With multiple inboxes, which is a feature available in Gmail Labs, you can split up your inbox into upto 6 sections (your one true inbox + upto 5 configurable inboxes) and define what goes in them but unlike the default inbox types, you can stagger these sections on the sides or on top of your inbox. Today my inbox looks something like this

On the left is my inbox and on right are the ‘inboxes’ that I’ve setup using this Gmail feature.

In order to set this up, all you have to do is,

• Figure out how you want to split your inbox. An effective way to do this is to look at your to-do list. My to-do list almost always looks like this

• Looking at it, you can break down my tasks into ‘today’s personal tasks’, ‘follow ups’, ‘shared tasks’ and ‘miscellaneous’ (ad-hoc tasks that don’t make it to any to-do list). I figured I didn’t need to keep miscellaneous tasks in a separate section but it would help to keep a section for emails I referenced every now and then. It would save me the time I spent searching. So I decided I would configure 4 inboxes and label them as Tasks, Awaiting Reply, Delegated/Shared Work and Reference.
• Once you’ve decided on the number of ‘inboxes’, go to Settings > Stars and select equivalent number of icons there. These are the ones I use

• Go to Settings > Gmail Labs > Enable Multiple Inboxes > Hit Save

• Go to Settings > Multiple Inboxes > Configure the settings for each panel. This is what my settings looks like

And you’re done!

I find this method really simple to use and manage. All the stuff that fits in any of the inboxes, sits there. New unread/read messages sit in my inbox and everything else is archived and moved out of my sight forever unless the need arises in the future. Zero clutter whatsoever.

Like all methods, this one too has its pros and cons.

Pros

• Easy to move emails to a specific inbox (1,2,3 or 4 clicks)
• Serves as a to-do list
• Marking mails as unread/read makes no difference whatsoever
• Everything you need to look at is right in front of you and more importantly, everything else isn’t
• Even if you forget to add a star, unless you archive an email, which takes conscious effort, it will continue to sit in your inbox until an action is taken on it

Cons

• Doesn’t work on mobile.
• If emails in one ‘inbox’ exceed max limit set, they get hidden from you.

Thankfully, I can live with both those limitations :)

If you’d like to set this up for yourself, Andreas Klinger, the CTO of Product Hunt, has written a much more detailed post on the subject. It is in fact his article that led me to discover the beauty of multiple inboxes last summer.

Besides using the right inbox style, there are a lot of other tools, tips and tricks that have made my life simpler.

1.Don’t delete emails — Always archive. You never know what you might need. Gmail provides a lot of space so make the most of it.

2. Gmail search — This is perhaps my most favourite thing about Gmail. The search so powerful and simple to use. Using a combination of the following operators, I can find almost anything

• to: — To which email address the email was sent to.
  eg. to: team@inperpetualbeta.com
• from: — From which email address the email was sent
  eg. from: aamnakhan28@gmail.com
• has:attachment — Searches for emails with attachments
• filename: — Searches contents of the filenames of attachments
  eg. has:attachment filename:pdf
• in: — Searches within the contents of folder specified
  eg. in:inbox
• “ “ (double-quotes) — Search for an exact match to the enclosed string eg. “perpetual beta”
• You can find more operators here.

3. Keyboard shortcuts — I move through my email faster thanks to them. Highly recommended memorising the most basic ones at least. If you need help learning(and use Gmail), you can use the Key Rocket browser plugin.

4. Undo Send — If you don’t already know about this, today is your lucky day. Yes, you can un-send an email. This feature sat in the Gmail Labs section for a long time and was made a part of General settings only last year. You can even configure for how long you want the undo-send option to persist after sending an email.

5. Canned Responses — This is great when you’re doing outreach or outbound sales and want to send the same content to multiple people but you also want to personalise the email. You can enable them under Settings > Labs. You can also send automated canned responses when a configured rule is triggered (like a vacation responder but better).

6. Setup Smart Filters — There are some emails that you wish to receive but not read. They just end up cluttering your inbox. For example, we use Crashlytics in our mobile app. I do wish to receive crash reports but I don’t want my inbox getting cluttered with them. So I’ve setup a smart filter which auto archives any crash report and adds a label called ‘Crashlytics’ to it for easy access later.

You can read more about creating Gmail filters here.

7. Any.do Browser Extension — I’m a big fan of any.do. Their browser extension acts like a Gmail plugin which gives an option to add reminders and it pre-fills the text box contextually!

You can get the extension here.

8. Gmail backup — I have tried only one service and it worked really well. I recommend GYB (got your back). It lets you do a lot of cool things (such as not backing up emails you don’t require etc). It does require you to use the command line but it’s a cakewalk, trust me.

9. If you’re obsessive about your email habits and want to measure how much time you’re spending checking your email, try Rescue Time.

10. If you’re just fed up of receiving mails, hit the Pause button.

I recently came back from a week long vacation to find 200 unread emails in my inbox and experienced no anxiety whatsoever. #smallwins

If you enjoyed this article, do recommend:)

Other reads

• 3 Cognitive Biases I Face As A Product Manager
• The Non-Developer Guide to Event Tracking in Single Page Applications - It's An App World
• Setting Up Analytics for Single Page Applications

I’d love to hear your feedback. You can hit me up on Twitter or mail me at aamnakhan28@gmail.com.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.

Getting to Inbox Zero — A Long Arduous Journey was originally published in Perpetual Beta on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every now and then, in the flurry of information and opinion hurled at us, we come across something that just sticks. Last year I came across an article from Business Insider that described the various cognitive biases we humans face in our everyday lives. Since I’ve read the article I often try to spot these biases either in my own actions or those of others. I must admit that it’s far easier to recognise them in other peoples’ actions rather than my own.

Over time I’ve realised that there are three biases in particular that I often deal with at work.

Information Bias

Information bias is the urge to seek more information in order to make a decision when this extra information is actually irrelevant to the decision.

I have a lot of data to work with. Hotjar lets me record user sessions. Google Analytics lets me slice and dice session data. Localytics lets me create funnels to see where my users are dropping off in the app. There’s tons of internal CRM data I look at. A lot of times it happens that I’m looking at X data in order to make a decision and realise there’s also Y and Z and think may be that will be useful and before I know it I have I’ve spent 2 hours pouring over data that has proven useless to the decision-making process.

It’s fun to look at data and draw insights but if done without a clear objective it can take up significant amount of time (and you won’t realise because you enjoy it). I’m not against looking at data without a concrete goal in mind, often you’re left with more questions than answers and that’s not necessarily a bad thing; but when you’re working towards something specific with limited time at hand, it helps to clearly outline your objective. It takes quite a bit of discipline to not get carried away. This discipline, I admit, I’m still working on. This one time I was querying our internal data for something and realised I could do a market basket analysis on what people purchased. And I did end up doing that but that information wasn’t immediately useful and I hadn’t started work on the original problem at all.

To prevent this from happening, I now make it a point to spend some time before I begin on a problem just thinking about what I want to achieve with the data I’m looking for and how I’m going to get to it. This initial clarity helps a great deal in avoiding any arbitrary waste of time later.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to only listen to, look for or remember information that confirms our preconceptions or beliefs.

Knowingly or unknowingly, we all form preconceptions about a lot of things. When we meet someone new, we might already have formed an opinion about them because someone told us something and everything this new person does seems to confirm what we already think of him/her. We run an A/B test and we’re already pretty sure what the outcome is going to favour. We run a new marketing campaign, we’re confident it’s going to work and we’ll find metrics that support our claim.

This is a tough bias to identify and avoid. So many times I’m confident of the outcome of some test we’re running and any other result ‘just can’t be’. These preconceptions can be particularly dangerous. For instance, I track on a daily basis, the number of people who reach the error screen in our app. In one particular release, we had fixed a bunch of bugs which I had assumed were the reason behind the high percentage of people reaching the error screen. Post that release I was confident that the number would decrease. And it did. So I triumphantly mailed my team how we finally had fewer people facing errors in our app. It was then a colleague pointed out that it was possible that the overall traffic to our app could have dropped which could have resulted in a decrease in the metric. And he was right. Marketing had paused a bunch of campaigns and our DAUs had dropped. Of course, I should have looked at the metric as a percentage of DAUs but my bias got the better of me.

I’ve become more conscious of this now. I figured the only way to beat this was to double check all facts and get a second opinion wherever possible. It’s made me slightly skeptical; when data confirms my preconceptions I tend to get suspicious. But I’d rather be skeptical than be biased.

Blind Spot Bias

The failure to recognise your own biases is a cognitive bias in itself.

It’s a natural tendency to think that we aren’t biased. We tend to judge people for their perceptions and label them as biased and are more inclined to think of ourselves as unbiased and better individuals. In one study, over 600 people were surveyed and only 1 person said that he/she was more biased than the average person.

The struggle to be objective is constant. There have been times when I’ve pushed for something I really believe in, it could be a feature or a bug fix that I thought should have been prioritised. When things didn’t work in my favour it left me pretty sour and annoyed. But in retrospect, and this has happened a embarrassing number of times, I found that I had severely over-judged the value of my ask and highly underestimated the effort that would go into it. It’s amazing how blindsided we can get.

I’m still working on being less biased (and I don’t think I’ll ever get to a point where I can stop). What about you? How do you deal with your biases?

If you enjoyed this article, do recommend:)

Follow me on Medium — Aamna Khan

Follow me on Twitter

@_aamnakhan

Related articles

• Getting to Inbox Zero — A Long Arduous Journey
• The Non-Developer Guide to Event Tracking in Single Page Applications - It's An App World
• Setting Up Analytics for Single Page Applications

I’d love to hear your feedback. You can hit me up on Twitter or mail me at aamnakhan28@gmail.com.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.

3 Cognitive Biases I Face As A Product Manager was originally published in Perpetual Beta on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.