5 Powerful Tips for Keeping an Empty Inbox 📥

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At the end of each day, my inbox looks exactly like this:

But most people have very cluttered inboxes. Email can go from being a great communication tool to a pile of useless junk quickly if you don’t use it correctly. Below are the tips I use to quickly clean my inbox at the end of the day. Use them to regain control over your inbox and get closer to a more organized digital life.

Note: Some of the examples here refer specifically to Gmail. Still, these ideas can be implemented in all the other email platforms as well.

Why You Should Keep Your Inbox Empty

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Peace of Mind

Just like a cluttered desk or a dirty house can cause distractions and lower productivity, your digital environment can affect your mind similarly.

An empty inbox means one less thing to stress about. You will be less worried knowing everything is in place and that you have handled all the important emails.

Never Miss an Opportunity

If your inbox has hundreds of unanswered emails that you know are not important, it will be hard to find the one sneaky message that you do want to read.

Maintaining your inbox capacity means all critical messages will be addressed.

It’s Not Your Work Tool

People leave unanswered emails, follow-ups, and just about anything in their inboxes. They check their inbox daily and treat it as “work”.

Number 4 on the list below will elaborate more on that, but remember that an email is a communication tool. You use it to have conversations or to inform. But at the end of the day, keep your to-do list the only source of truth regarding your tasks. Most of the meaningful work doesn’t happen using mail.

The steps below should help you process all your emails and spend as little time as possible dealing with them.

Five Tips for a Clean Inbox

1. Unsubscribe

First things first, we need to make sure you are only getting emails that you want to get. When you see a message from a newsletter that you don’t wish to read anymore, don’t just delete it.

Take the extra step and unsubscribe from it. Scroll to the bottom of the page, look for the unsubscribe bottom, and use it. This extra click will ensure you won’t be bombarded with those annoying emails in the future, and you’ll have more space in your inbox for the important stuff.

2. Use Shortcuts

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We are not talking about copy-paste shortcuts.

Learning Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts will allow you to organize your emails extremely fast. There is a shortcut to almost every crucial action. Here are a few valuable examples:

• Archive mail — E
• Compose new mail — C
• Reply to an email — R
• Reply all to an email — A
• Forward a mail — F
• Go to inbox — G + I

The list of shortcuts is way longer. Check them out here.

3. Create Rules & Labels

Now that you have discarded the unimportant stuff, it’s time to organize the existing information.

Labels
After reading an email, store it in a label with the relevant name. Create labels by identifying repeating senders or topics.

For example, you can have a label name “Dad” to store conversations you had with your dad and another label called “Invoices” for keeping your receipts and some billing information that you get over the mail.

Filters
After that, go into each label, click on one of the emails and click on the three dots at the top. Select “Filter messages like these.”

“Filter messages like these”

This action will present you with a filter creation flow. You will select your conditions, and then you will choose what actions will apply to the emails that meet these conditions.

Because you choose “Filter messages like this” some conditions will already be filled inside. For example, when I’m in my dad’s label, I can see that the “From” field already has my father’s email address.

We the conditions look good, click on “Create Filter.” Then you get to decide what will happen to the emails when they get to your inbox. You can make some messages skip the inbox entirely, apply a label to them, forward them automatically, delete them, and so much more.

Use filters to automate actions you are doing over and over again.

4. Move Work Items to Your Tasks App

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You should use email for communication purposes, not for so called “Work”.

The famous GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity system suggests consolidating all tasks from your various communication channels (email, Slack, WhatsApp) into a single place. That way, it’s easier to prioritize your work and focus on your goals for today.

When a co-worker sends you an email asking you for something, write it your task down and move the email out of your inbox.

You can use a tasks management app (like Todoist) or just pen and paper, but ensure you have one source of truth for all your tasks. Don’t make your email another source of stress.

Overview of the GTD method by David Allen

5. Snooze emails

Let’s say you read an email that you can’t answer right now or need to be reminded about a week from now. You have no choice but to leave it in the inbox, right?

Wrong!
Use the snooze button to remove the email from your inbox and receive it again when you want to get it.

This fantastic feature ensures that your inbox contains only emails you can deal with, making cleaning it much more manageable.

Go through email only once!

Time to use everything you just learned. Schedule time to review your emails each day, and make sure you deal with each email only once! One of the actions below should apply to each email:

• When you encounter an email you didn’t want to receive, check if you can unsubscribe from that sender.
• Label every email and archive it to remove it from the inbox (it will still be available when you click on the label or when you search for it)
• Use filters for recurring actions that you do (labeling, deleting, snoozing)
• Snooze emails that you can’t answer at this moment.
• Use shortcuts to do everything faster 🙂