How to Achieve Inbox Zero

Introduction

In last week’s post I made the case for Inbox Zero: that is, for being so on top of your email that your inbox is virtually empty (say, a dozen or fewer emails). To recap, Inbox Zero is about being more effective with email, meaning you’ll possibly read less of it, definitely re-read much less of it, and stop missing important emails because they were buried under all the unimportant ones. The goal is to make better use of our time, so that we spend less of it doing email. In this post, I am going to explain exactly how to achieve and maintain Inbox Zero, based on how I’ve managed it for the last several years.

[A note on the art above: a concerned reader was aghast at my use of A.I. to create the art for last week’s post. She was so keen to keep it real, she created this original art just for me—and you.]

One prerequisite

There is an important prerequisite to achieving Inbox Zero, at least the way I do it: you have to use Gmail as your email interface. This doesn’t mean you have to use a Gmail account. (More on this later.) Now, I’m not some major Google fanboy, and they didn’t sponsor or promote this post (or this blog) in any way. Google makes its money through ads, and I’m not big on advertising. I also don’t appreciate how their YouTube algorithm tried to addict me to sexy yoga videos. Moreover, I bristled at the original Gmail because the consumer version, when it came out, had ads that were generated based on its bot reading the email message content. This so unnerved me, I created a technique to stymie it. But Google eventually ditched the ads, probably after reading this blog and realizing I was right. (Yes, that was a joke.) But now I’m sold on Gmail.

When my employer switched to Google Workspace, and Gmail became a part of my daily life, I realized not only that its conversation view is much more efficient, but that the use of labels instead of folders makes all kinds of sense. In fact, labels are the key to maintaining Inbox Zero. So if you’re still committed to using Outlook, this post isn’t going to be of much help.

If you don’t use Gmail, don’t stop reading! If you’re not among the 76% of Americans use Gmail for their personal email, you can still keep your Yahoo or Hotmail account, and set up the Gmail interface (both on your laptop and your Android app) to pull in email from either (or both) of those platforms. The Gmail interface works great for my personal email (which is on my own domain, via the Yahoo/Turbify platform), along with my Gmail, of course. It’s nice to get everything in one place.

(I’m not going to explain how to port your Yahoo or Hotmail over to Gmail … that kind of task is what ChatGPT is for. It did a great job guiding me through the process. When one of its instructions doesn’t work—which will happen, as these interfaces undergo minor changes all the time—ChatGPT can course-correct very well. In fact, if you told ChatGPT, “I am having trouble with the POP3 settings because my neighbor is having a huge party and they’re making too much noise,” GPT will help by asking, “Would you like me to draft a speech or brief note that you can present to ask them to quiet down?” And if upon reading this draft you respond, “The note needs to be shorter and more emphatic because I want to write it in Sharpie on my husband’s bare chest,” GPT will accommodate that request as well. So, you may now wonder, why wouldn’t you just ask ChatGPT how to get to Inbox Zero? The answer is, because it’s only really good at rote technical configurations, not at strategy. Yet.)

My Inbox Zero strategy

As with all techniques for everything, there are five steps to reaching and maintaining Inbox Zero. No, this methodology won’t get you to where you literally have zero emails in your inbox, but when you start doing start-of-day triage and some catch-up throughout the day, you’ll get to where most of the time you’ll have relatively few. The crucial thing is to have no more  in your inbox than Gmail’s first page can display. The default is 50 threads. Anything that doesn’t fit on this first page is guaranteed to be neglected, because the chances of you ever seeing it are negligible. (Sure, you could find those emails with the search feature, but how will you know to search if you don’t know the email exists? Do you routinely search on “invoice past due”? Or are you waiting for someone to say, “What? You didn’t see my email?” so you can search on their address?)

With no further ado, here are the steps.

Step #1 – Create a few filters and a couple of new labels

This step is mainly necessary for your work email, and is optional if you work for a small business. But if you work for a large corporation, you surely get a ton of email that’s broadcast daily from HR, your marketing department, news feeds, vendors, and various other non-personal sources. You are generally not expected to respond to these emails, so they should definitely be considered lower priority. They shouldn’t compete for precious visible-inbox real estate with any email that a human took some trouble writing.

Thus, you should create filters that target the daily all-hands update emails and filter them out such that they don’t even hit your inbox. Since these messages are not as useless as direct marketing solicitations, you’ll want to also label them (automatically!) in case you need to find them later. Figure out how many labels you need: you might have a “Corp updates” label and another for “Industry news,” or you might just have a catch-all for “Bulletins etc.” Now, I know filtering out emails so they never hit your inbox can seem scary, but bear in mind two things. One, if you haven’t been doing Inbox Zero, lot of emails have always been invisible to you anyway, by being buried among others and/or not on the first page of your inbox. Two, you can always peek at the mass of unfiltered emails by clicking the “All Mail” link down the left of your screen:

(If you don’t see this “All Mail” link it’s because Gmail has hidden it; click the “More” link to expose it. In the snapshot at left, the view is expanded so there’s a “Less” link; that’s where the “More” link would be shown if this view were collapsed.)

For your personal email, the first filter should get rid of unasked-for solicitations like the daily email you get from Speedo because you once bought that bathing suit from them (you know, the one that didn’t even fit so you returned it). Filter out all these quasi-spammers—the companies you did choose to do business with who are now like remoras. (Myself, I have a Hotmail account that I use for all e-commerce so I can more easily ignore that spam. If I need to file a receipt I log into the Hotmail, find it, and forward it to my personal email. Otherwise I ignore Hotmail entirely; it’s at Inbox 48,376.)

With these various filters in place, at least you’ve somewhat mitigated the fusillade of daily emails, hopefully reducing it to under fifty so that facing your Inbox for daily triage will be less daunting.

Next, if this is your work email, create a label that is your boss’s name, and set up a filter that applies this label to each of this person’s emails to you—without removing the email from your Inbox. Make this a bold, perhaps red label. If you’re lucky and your boss is named Aaron, this label will automatically show up at the top of your list of labels (which is also your list of folders … more on this later). If your boss’s name isn’t Aaron, put an underscore character at the beginning to move it up. Going forward, instead of starting your workday by perusing your inbox, you can start in your “Boss” folder (or, if your emails don’t pile up too fast, you can still start in the inbox and just look for that bright red label.) The idea here is that the very first emails you should read are the ones from the person who has direct influence on your salary. In the below example, the person’s boss is named Zoe, so two underscore characters are required.

You’ll also want to create a label called “_Follow-up.” Make this a bright color, too. The underscore character before the “F” is to move this label to(ward) the top of the list. The “_Follow-up” label is important for both your work and personal email … more on this later.

Does it make sense to automatically flag emails from your spouse, the way you did with your boss? Perhaps, but only if you get a lot of email from him or her. (Mine just yells across the house, like me.)

Again, ChatGPT can walk you through how to set up the actual filters and create and color-code the labels. All kinds of helpful people have already documented this process in various forums etc., so ChatGPT can research and distill that process for you.

Step #2: Clean slate

Obviously if you’re currently buried in thousands of emails after years of neglect, you’ll need to start with something other than mere triage … it’s a little late for that. To achieve a clean slate, take a deep breath and ask yourself what the odds are that you’re really going to ever read emails 51 through 25,359 in your inbox. Once you have accepted that the answer is “hell no,” you need to just archive them all, in one fell swoop. First navigate to your inbox. Then find the little checkbox just below the “Search mail” field at the top of the Gmail interface. If you hover your cursor over it, a tool-tip will appear that says “Select.” Check that box to select the first 50 emails, or better yet, accept the offer to select all 25,359 of them (i.e., however many you have total). Then click the icon next to the checkbox that looks like a folder with a down-arrow on it, as shown below. This will archive all selected messages, which means they’ll no longer be in your inbox. Where do they go? Into the ether. Probably the same place electricity goes when you turn out the light. They’re still on the mail server, though, and you can still see them by selecting “All Mail” as described above. But you don’t need to see them. They’re dead to you. Get on with your life.

[A note on the screenshots in this post: some are a bit hard to read. Click on a picture to enlarge it.]

The only problem with that mass archival is that nothing is labeled, so it’ll be hard to find past emails. That’s the consequence of waiting this long to get organized. Proper implementation of Inbox Zero means being organized going forward, not just clutter-free. Thus, once you have zero emails in your inbox (or maybe half a dozen new emails since they continuously pop up out of nowhere), you need to do regular triage on all the new stuff.

Step #3: Triage and pre-labeling

Okay, let’s assume you now have a clean slate and an inbox that doesn’t represent years of neglect. When you open Gmail first thing in the morning, you’ll likely still see dozens of emails, and you’ll start to panic, but don’t. Just follow these rules in making your way through the pile.

Start with the boss. Remember that new filter you created that automatically labels emails from your boss? Read those first. (If this is your personal email, and you created a rule to automatically flag messages from, say, your kid who’s a terrified college freshman, start with those.)

Jettison spam. If you see spam or quasi-spam messages, delete them on sight. You can go down the list of threads selecting all the chaff via the checkbox, then click the garbage can icon on your toolbar. This is incredibly satisfying. If you’re seeing a lot of spam from a single source, create a filter to kill it off forever. (Zap Zappos! See ya later, Speedo!)

(I had to cheat with the snapshot above … that’s a view of the Promotions tab, where Gmail automatically moves the quasi-spam solicitations. If you don’t see inbox tabs like Promotions, Social, and Updates, enable them in Settings/Categories.)

Scan for important messages first. Scan through the subject lines for anything that looks important, like one from a friend you’re making plans with, or a work colleague you’re knee-deep in a project with, or a thread you’ve been working that has new activity, and open that first. Scanning never worked before, because you had too many emails. Now it’s actually a reasonable way to triage.

Pre-label your threads. For every email you open, all you’re doing right now is skimming it to judge its level of importance, and—crucially—labeling it. This is the most important rule: don’t wait until later to “file” it. Label it now, and it’ll kind of almost be filed already. (More on the “why” of this in a minute.) Note that you’re not moving this using the very obvious button on the tool bar (i.e., the one shown below). That will remove the thread from your inbox. You want to label it while leaving it in the inbox, for this triage phase.

Instead of clicking “Move,” click on the three-dot “kabob” icon (if you hover over it, a tooltip will tell you it’s the “More” icon) and select “Label as” from the drop-down menu. It’ll show you a list of all your labels, and you can either just scroll down and find the right label, or you can start typing the name of a label and it’ll zip right to it. Click on the label name, if you’re only applying one label, and you’re done.

You won’t need to bother with the kebab menu if you switch to the advanced toolbar. Here’s how to switch:

Then you’ll have a dedicated button to apply a label without moving the thread:

The great thing about labels in Gmail, vs. folders in platforms like Outlook, is that you can apply more than one label to an email thread. That way, it’ll show up in multiple folders. Well, not folders exactly … that’s the confusing thing about labels in Gmail. Yes, they label message threads, but they also act like folders. (Kind of like how light is both a particle and a wave.) When it comes to classifying a thread, you’re applying labels. But labels act like folders when you’re at the main Gmail screen and want to navigate your threads. It’s like your threads can be in two or more folders at once.

Let me give you an example. Several of my friends and family members like beer as much as I do. We send each other Beck’sts, which are beer-themed emails (click here for details). Often one Beck’st begets another, and we have stirring dialogues not just about our beers, but about other topics like being middle-aged, being a parent, etc. (Oddly, a fair bit of my modern correspondence begins with a Beck’st.) Since these threads aren’t just about beer, but also about friends and family, I want to label them accordingly. So I select “Label as” from the drop-down, and check boxes next to all the appropriate labels:

When I’m done, the thread will have all the labels it needs. This means I can hunt for it in my brother B—’s folder, or my friend D—’s folder, etc. If I remember, for example, that D— wrote me about becoming a grandpa, I can search on “grandpa” in his folder whether or not I remember (years from now) that he announced this via a Beck’st.

(Sometimes, you’ll have labeled and archived—i.e., filed—a thread only to receive a new response to it, perhaps from someone on the distro who hadn’t chimed in before. The thread will show up in the Inbox again, at which point you can add the new correspondent’s label to it.)

Remember, you don’t maintain Inbox Zero by taking action on every email right away—you’re just labeling it during triage when this is so easy to do. Triage consists of figuring out whom the email is from, and what it’s about (if you bother to file/label emails by topic). You’re labeling it now, so you never have to revisit it again. Then you can actually get some work done, knowing the most important emails have at least been read and you know what’s waiting for action. Disorganization is distracting!

Again, the pre-labeling is the game-changer … if you try to file emails later, you’ll waste gobs of time re-reading each thread to try to remember what it’s about. Label it the first time you see it, as this will only take seconds. Then, filing later is just a matter of jettisoning it from your inbox.

Flag for follow-up.  If an email will obviously require a reply or some other action, don’t just label it by sender and/or topic—also apply the “_Follow-up” label you created in step #1. Some email is just information, and some needs action. This is the best way to differentiate. Also, by selecting the “_Follow-up” label/folder, you’re basically creating a to-do list of emails requiring action. 

To add to my exhortation to pre-label, the key difference between an email folder (like Outlook uses) and the labels that Gmail uses is that a label doesn’t, by itself, move the email. It just gives it an identity that will persist forever (unless you decide to un-label it). A labeled email is breathtakingly close to being a filed email … all you have to do is get it out of the inbox (by archiving it, or removing the “Inbox” label, which amount to the same thing).

Step #4: Archive messages

Once you’ve read or at least scanned all the emails in your inbox, it’s time to tackle the ones you labeled “_Follow-up.” Since this (probably) won’t be that many threads, you can see them all at once (perhaps by clicking the “_Follow-up” folder, or just eyeballing them in the non-overrun inbox), and decide which are the highest priority. Once they’re dealt with, you can remove the “_Follow-up” label and archive them. If there are emails remaining in your inbox, perhaps a few of them should stay there (to be visible for a while, even if they don’t require action) but others can be archived right away, and all of them eventually. (There’s really no point leaving them in your inbox forever, especially when they’re already labeled.)

There are two ways to archive (i.e., file) email threads: the Archive button, and removing the “Inbox” label. Here’s how you’d archive via the button:

Or, you can click the little “x” on the “Inbox” label; now this message will no longer appear in the inbox.

This second method has the benefit of being applicable across labels. For example, it’s how you’d remove the “_Follow-up” label after action is taken. So when you think your inbox is getting out of hand, you can start at the bottom and work your way up, deciding when it’s time to click the “x” next to the “Inbox” and/or “_Follow-up” labels as appropriate. When you’re done, not only will you be closer to Inbox Zero, but you’ll have made great progress in your filing. If you get behind on that, but realize 20 of your emails are no longer timely, you can just check them all and click Archive. Since they already had labels, they’re now correctly filed, and you didn’t have to reopen them!

A final note on labels: I recommend that, upon sending an email that is not a response (i.e., starting a new thread), you go into your Sent items and slap a label on the message. For example, when I send a Beck’st, I’ll label it, so that even if nobody responds it’ll still show up in my Beck’st folder. And if somebody does respond, his response will already be labeled.

Step #5: Segregate email accounts (optional)

It’s not uncommon to juggle multiple email accounts. Over the past few years, I’ve had my personal email in Outlook; my high school mountain bike coaching emails on a different address, also in Outlook; and my Gmail, which is non-work business email (e.g., LinkedIn stuff). Now I’ve collapsed all three into my Gmail interface, to take advantage of all the features described above.

That said, I still like to have my personal email separate from business, so I created a rule that adds an “Inbox – albertnet account” label on all emails addressed to my personal address, and has these messages skip the main (Gmail) inbox. As with my other inbox, messages are automatically labeled as they come in, and then when I’ve responded (or have decided I don’t need to) I archive them by removing the “Inbox – albertnet account” label.

If your Gmail interface manages multiple addresses, you can set any of your addresses as default, so when you create a message it’ll come from that address, unless you manually change it for that thread. When you reply to a message, it will be sent from whatever account received the email, unless you manually change it for that thread.

Conclusion

I’ll grant you this has been a long, complicated post. It might be pretty daunting to imagine embracing this approach. But to recall last week’s post, an Adobe study of 1,000 white collar Americans found that on average they spent 8.9 hours a day between personal and work email … wouldn’t it be nice to streamline this? Wouldn’t you rather learn one methodology that makes you more efficient, than waste valuable time on into the future on this unavoidable activity? I’m here to tell you that I’m far more efficient and effective since I adopted Inbox Zero … you can be, too.

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