When one of my clients was talking about how he was on top of things and was at Zero Inbox, he reminded me that this was one of the things I have been thinking about implementing.
It’s been on my mind for a while because I had 11k emails on my business and 13k emails on my private account. My email account was like a mini-storage system of todos, reference material, and conversations for years. Every time I opened my phone, I would be reminded of the 24k emails. It bothered me but not enough to do something about it.
Now was the time to get it sorted so I bought a short course from Asian Efficiency (1). Of course, I could have searched through all the free videos on YouTube but I wanted it condensed. I watched the videos and implemented them straight away. It was straight forward with 2 basic rules:
1) Touch it once
2) 2 min rule – if it takes longer than 2 mins then send it to a task system. If shorter than 2 mins, do it straight away.
They had 3 places to send emails to:
1) Task management system: I use asana so learnt how to send mails there so they automatically become tasks.
2) Reference – I considered sending to Evernote or archiving.
3) Read it later system – I decided not to use another system as I know what I am like. It’s unlikely I will get to it plus I don’t want another system to look at. Instead, I have added a part to Asana with Books, Courses, Films that I want to follow up with later.
I am now the proud owner of a zero inbox but that’s just the beginning. The real work will be maintaining it.
Do you have a zero inbox? If not, would you like one? If I can get from 24k to one, so can you.
Footnotes