Inbox Zero: a new email frontier

y!kes

I spent the entirety of last week upload­ing mail from user accounts into the Google.  and what i saw in the process shocked and fright­ened me!  i saw mas­sive, bloated inboxes, over­flow­ing with unread mes­sages and one-off memos that should’ve been deleted the moment their mes­sage met your visual cor­tex.  i saw fold­ers of fold­ers full of fold­ers, i found emails con­tem­po­rary with the early Bush Jr. years.  i was scared.

so i thought to myself, “self.  how can we help these peo­ple?”  I could attempt to indoc­tri­nate you all with task-management regimes and par­tially absorbed train­ing ses­sions…  or i could, no–wait.  that sounds good, lets do that first one.

In prepa­ra­tion for the upcom­ing tech train­ing at the 11/2008 staff meet­ing i hope to air a few notions, throw out some con­cepts for your con­sid­er­a­tion.  my main goal in doing this is to get you to think just a lit­tle bit about how we email.  and how we use it.  as a tool, as a means for doing busi­ness effectively.

Allow me to present the first idea:  A clut­tered inbox = a clut­tered mind.  And, if i may quote En Vogue directly, “Free your mind, and the rest will fol­low.”  Your home­work is to read this blog post by Mer­lin Mann  of 43folders.com and to brave his advice if you’ve got the gump­tion.  Its a dras­tic “select all”, approach to clear­ing your inbox, but its a GREAT first step.

NOTE:  The gmail equiv­a­lent of Mann’s method would be to select all mes­sages and click “Archive”.

select all and archive

Once your inbox is clear there are a host of tips and strate­gies for keep­ing it that way.  and i think that once you expe­ri­ence the sat­is­fac­tion of clear­ing out your inbox, and the calm that comes with it, you’ll only want to know more!

And more to come indeed in my series on enhanc­ing your email fu and find­ing the road to “inbox zero”.