“0 email inbox” technique

Written by Nazim Akbarov, Information Security

Information overflow has been an issue for a few years already, despite surging popularity of instant messengers in a corporate environment (i.e. Skype, Slack, Teams) email remains the main type of formal communication. If a colleague has not developed her own sustainable email management style, productivity issues will inevitably creep in affecting the “level of happiness” at work.

In the last couple of years, I witnessed some colleagues who came up with their own email management routine in a natural way. However most of them often stop after creating a few inbox rules to sort the regular subscription emails and tackling the rest on the “first came” basis.

I ran into a situation when the amount of emails I had to work with on a daily basis started to increase rapidly. What made it worse is the fact that apart from the regular messages from colleagues, managers and stakeholders of various nature there were spikes or short-term influx of messages related to various incidents, customer support cases and external parties.

Daily struggle with such an important business tool made me look for a suitable email management technique and practices shared by other people. I tried few approaches but every time swiped them away after a few days of use.

“It’s simple, just delete them all” once I was told, which could be the case if it was the last day at work.

The Concept

Once I discovered a concept of “0 email inbox” which is based on three 3 foundational principles:

1. High level goal is to have 0 emails in Inbox folder at the end of each day
2. There are only 5 categories of emails
3. No email gets deleted

The first principle represents a daily goal, that is — at the end of each working day “Inbox” folder must contain no emails.

How to make it work?

To build this system follow the instructions and configure Microsoft Outlook accordingly. No code typing is required. Once finished it will follow you on any Windows device or Outlook for web.

Part 1 — Create email categories

Create 5 categories in Outlook. Open “Categorize” menu on Outlook “Home”
ribbon and click on “All categories”

Click on “New” button.

Name the categories accordingly and use colour coding to make it visually more appealing:
1. Action: Archive 2. Action: Read 3. Action: Urgent 4. Action: Waiting for response 5. Action: When possible

Part 2 — Create folders

Typical Outlook folder structure contains many folders.
This system is aiming for simplicity and requires only three folders in addition to the default set.

Action | Archive | Read

Part 3 — Create “Quick Steps”

Outlook has a great feature called “Quick Steps” which will allow us to program the necessary actions. While the words “to program” may sound frightening for some people, but actually no coding is required.

On “Home” tab click the little black arrow in “Quick Steps” menu.

Click on “Custom” menu item

Incoming email must be assigned to one of these 3 categories:
Action: Urgent — Emails which require urgent action, usually within 24 hours
Action: When possible — Emails which require action within this week
Action: Read — Emails which have to be read but require no further action

A sent email can be either this category or none:
Action: Waiting for response — Emails which I am waiting to be replied to

When the “job is done” i.e. action completed or response received, this category is assigned:
Action: Archive — Archived emails. Any previous category will be eventually “Archived”

For “Action: Urgent” emails use the following settings. For “Action: When possible” emails use the following settings. For “Action: Read” emails use the following settings.

For “Action: Waiting for response” emails use the following settings. And finally, “Action: Archive” emails use the following settings:

Final part — “Quick Access” toolbar

Microsoft Outlook has a configurable “Quick Access” toolbar. Let’s put the “Quick Steps” menu to this toolbar.

Click on the little black triangular arrow and select “More Commands” menu item. Select “All Commands” at the top Find “Quick Steps” Hit the “Add” button. Now the “Quick Access” toolbar has “Quick Steps” drop down menu added to it

“Quick Steps” menu is also accessible with the right click on email itself.

Categorised emails will have a neat and tidy look.
Produce reminders and bear colour codes according to the previously made “Quick Steps” configuration

Words: Bill Coleman, Software Architect.
Editor: Julia Commons
Illustrator: Michelle Hird