Five Sneaky Email Cheats for Our Quest for Inbox Zero

From Sil­i­con Val­ley Watcher

This one is from 43 Fold­ers. It is a great feel­ing to have zero mes­sages on your inbox at the end of every day. So as a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion, I sug­gest you go for Inbox Zero this year.

In the words of the great Lucas Jack­son: “Yeah, well, some­times nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

The Tem­plate

I’ll bet that eighty per­cent of your email involves send­ing or respond­ing to the same 5–10 basic mes­sages over and over. Think of all the times you’ve groaned, and thought “Ugh. Again?” Yeah, those.

For the love of God, acquire and use a pro­gram that will let you use tem­plates. Try Mail­Tem­plate for Mail.app and Entourage or the built-in tem­plates in Thun­der­bird. Either makes it easy to start a new email or a response based on an exist­ing boil­er­plate document.

Use the shit out of these for:

• Basic “thank you” responses
• Responses to fre­quently asked questions
• Responses to admin­is­tra­tive infor­ma­tion requests
• Best use ever? Flame responses. I refuse to spend time think­ing about stu­pid peo­ple, so I’ve man­i­cured a hand­ful of very rea­son­able responses to the insane, troll-y ques­tions I get over and over from the sad dun­geon mas­ters of America’s many par­ents’ basements.

It’s more atten­tion than some folks deserve, but I do like to be polite when I can. Auto­mated polite­ness requir­ing a sin­gle click is awesome.

The link

I get a lot of requests from read­ers that — God bless you, kids — is right there, above the fold, on the first set of returns on Google.

In com­bi­na­tion with a tem­plated wrap­per, “Here’s a link that might be what you’re look­ing for…” is a great and super-fast (non-prose) response.

The ques­tion

I’m not proud of this one, but I do use it. If I’ve sat on an email for a long time, I some­times get the ball back in motion with a very low-threshold ques­tion to the sender.

Hon­estly? Ask­ing “Do you still need this?” might be the most time-saving ques­tion you’ve ever asked.

The “I don’t know”

If you don’t have an answer for some­thing, please just say so. Def­i­nitely don’t do the oppo­site — tap-dancing gamely for three screens to try and seem smart.

“I have absolutely no idea” is a valid answer and gives the sender exactly the infor­ma­tion needed to keep look­ing; “I don’t know — but here’s three peo­ple who might” is even bet­ter and might make you the big hero.

The delete key

Seri­ously: is this an email you are ever going to respond to? If it’s more than a week or two old, either answer it or delete it now.

If this strikes you as unsat­is­fac­tory or feels “mean and icky,” then ask your­self why, pre­cisely, you’re still star­ing at this mes­sage instead of respond­ing to it. Under what con­di­tions, in your mind, will this email mag­i­cally become more “answerable?”

So why, then, can’t you sum­mon that needed answer­abil­ity right now and just get the hell rid of it? Yes, exactly.

Delete it, move on, and don’t look back.