Clear Clutter from Your Inbox

Work­ing here in my new office has done me a lot of good. Because I’m work­ing with sev­eral clients at the same time, I have to be orga­nized or I will get lost in all the paper­work and the myr­iad of meet­ings, doc­u­ments and emails I’m get­ting from them. One of the first things I did was to clean up my work­sta­tion so that only the essen­tials are there. Every­thing else (i.e. scis­sors, scotch tape, bond­pa­per, etc.) I can bor­row from some­one else in the office any­way, so I let go of the urge to hoard my own supplies.The next step is unclut­ter­ing your inbox. What is essen­tial here is to have a Gmail account because it pro­vides you the abil­ity to put labels and archive your posts. This makes for a really unclut­tered inbox (in fact, my rule is to have 0 mes­sages at the end of every day). Any­thing you will need later on will be avail­able by search­ing for it or look­ing for its label.

I open my gmail three times a day: when I reach the office in the morn­ing, at around 130pm (after lunch) and just before I go home in the after­noon. Unless there’s a need to chat with some­one using the Google Talk fea­ture, I do not open my inbox at any other time. This pre­vents me from tak­ing too much time on email which should be spent doing some­thing else.

When I open my inbox, I do one of four things to EVERY email:

1) Erase — if the email’s not impor­tant, or if I have read it and I do not need to reply to it.
2) Reply — I try to reply imme­di­ately if the email only needs a quick reply. If it will take longer, I label it FOR REPLY and archive it.
3) Label — I then label each email accord­ing to its cat­e­gory. I have labels for each CLIENT, for PERSONAL emails, for IDEAS and FUTURE BLOG POSTS.
4) Archive — I then archive all the labeled emails.

Voila! my inbox has ZERO emails.

At the end of the day, I just go to my FOR REPLY label and reply accordingly.

Here are the tips men­tioned in Problogger’s quest to move from 10,000 emails to 0 in 24 hours, :

1. Move all email to GMAIL. To do this I for­warded all of my pre­vi­ous email addresses and con­tact forms so that they now arrive in my Gmail inbox.

2. Mer­ci­less Unsub­scrib­ing. Email 101 lessons always say that you should unsub­scribe to as many newslet­ters as you can. I was get­ting about 50 a week, most of which I didn’t EVER read. The first thing I did on Sun­day was to unsub­scribe from most of them and delete the major­ity of past ones that I’d put in my ‘read one day’ folder.

3. Gmail Fil­ter­ing and Labels I’d heard for some time now how good Gmail was at fil­ter­ing but until the week­end I’d not inves­ti­gated it. I so wish some­one had sat me down ear­lier and forced me to do it. On Sun­day I saw down for an hour and went through every email that I’d received for the last week. I didn’t do this to catch up on email but to get a fil­ter­ing sys­tem in place.

4. Iden­tify the impor­tant stuff I have some emails that I con­sider extra spe­cially impor­tant. Email from my wife, boss (at b5), email from my con­tact forms on my blogs, any email with the words ‘I hate you’….. You know the kind.

With this type of email I again use fil­ter­ing but instead of hid­ing it I high­light it. So any email com­ing from my wife’s email address, or with cer­tain words in it, or a cer­tain sub­ject line (eg my con­tact form’s) I can set up with a label like ‘impor­tant’. I could also assign it with a ’star’ (like a flag in many email clients). Even more ‘atten­tion grab­bing’ is the abil­ity to assign labels with col­ors. So for exam­ple I’ve assigned the label ‘ProBlog­ger Email’ (all email from my con­tact form) as hav­ing a bright ORANGE label to catch my atten­tion so that I can quickly see them in my inbox when i wake up in the morning.

1. Ang Pere­grino Rec­om­mends: Zen­Hab­its
2. Unclut­ter­ing Your Laundry