I'm doing the exact opposite as Michael; but I can't say which of us has the better system. I probably get a lot fewer emails.<p>I've given up on inbox zero -- I now use inbox infinity. Everything stays my inbox unless auto-categorized (mailing lists, specific clients, etc). When I look through my emails, I flag any email I'm not dealing with right now. Otherwise I reply, leave it, or delete it. I archive anything old than 6 months every 6 months.<p>I suppose, in effect, my list of flagged emails is my inbox-zero but I feel more connected to whole stream of email with the box full. I occasionally need scroll to previous days and glance around.<p>I also have a Pebble so I'm effectively checking email instantly all the time. I find with the pebble that I dismiss things much more frequently now (emails, texts, and calls). Perhaps because the act of looking at the Pebble is so passive compared to checking my phone or computer.
I would never give access to my email account to a fly-by-night SAAS service. Nevermind the privacy concerns of mining my data, I just wouldnt trust their security practices unless they prove otherwise. An email nowadays is considered your identity. Any breaches to it can have a number of social, professional and financial implications.<p>Case in point, unroll.me mentioned in this article has a number of issues [1] [2] and response of Josh Rosenwald, founder of unroll.me at [3] dismisses that risk for perceived convenience.<p>[1] <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SimonPhipps/posts/fJQZbGuoY9G" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SimonPhipps/posts/fJQZbGuoY9G</a><p>[2] <a href="http://startup-stuttgart.de/unroll-me-complete-mail-data-tremendous-security-hole/" rel="nofollow">http://startup-stuttgart.de/unroll-me-complete-mail-data-tre...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://startup-stuttgart.de/unroll-me-complete-mail-data-tremendous-security-hole/#comment-1361" rel="nofollow">http://startup-stuttgart.de/unroll-me-complete-mail-data-tre...</a><p>P.S. previous discussion of unroll.me security hole: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7035724" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7035724</a>
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who doesn't have this problem, even though I get a bajillion emails a day. Why is it so hard to hit Inbox Zero?
I get around 50 emails a day, and hover around inbox 40<p>Removing all filters and categorization has helped me reach this number, and forced a few habits and mindset changes:<p>1: I aggressively unsubscribe from mailing lists. If you have to make a filter to automatically archive a mailing list because you never read it but want to keep it just unsubscribe. If you have to, bookmark the site but if you aren't reading it now when will you be?<p>2: I ask a lot more of the people who email me. If I have partial answers I send those immediately, and if I know I won't get around to it for a while I make it clear that it will take time. I err on the side of archiving unfinished conversations as if it is important most people are OK with sending a follow-up email.
Can, uh, can someone please explain me how <i>exactly</i> you end up with a hundred mails in inbox? Every day?<p>This is a genuine question, please bear with me. I follow several high-traffic mailing lists, and I use e-mail as my primary means of Internet communication, because I started using it back when ICQ wasn't all the rage yet. But they're all tidied up and filtered. Checking my e-mail in the morning takes, what, five minutes, plus 10-15 minutes or so of reading messages from the mailing lists that I actively read because they're really important for my work. Every couple of days or so I spend maybe another thirty minutes skimming the other mailing lists, but <i>an hour</i> of e-mail is pretty much something that I've never done. Do various service-related e-mails pile up, like Facebook's neverending stream of notifications? If so, why is this news-worthy?<p>I regularly hear about it, and regularly hear that Gmail is particularly adept at dealing with this. I don't use Gmail; I have an old account there, opened when it was still invitation-based because every techie had to have one of course, but I'm not really sure about what else it can do other than, you know, filter messages. Are there any additional capabilities here?<p>And, Interwebs, please don't take this the wrong way -- I'm not trying to put up the smug l33t h4x0r attitude who doesn't understand how kids nowadays misuse computers, I'm really trying to understand how people use e-mail nowadays.
i get probably 1000 messages a day. inbox zero was never a goal of mine, and never will be. i'm not really sure what the point of it would be. seems futile.<p>i have 3 things that help me keep my mail organized (my startup runs its own postfix+dovecot mail server)<p>* mail client on dedicated vertical 24" monitor<p>* procmail (mailing lists, alerts, tickets)<p>* spamd (spam)<p>everything else hits my inbox, and if i don't delete a message, it stays there, where it stacks indefinitely.<p>search bar + at-a-glance view of every important message i've received in the last N days is useful, i'm not really sure where this obsession for having an empty inbox comes from. that would actually hinder my productivity.<p>lots of ssd + ram = right now there's 29,453 messages (and attachments) in my inbox and it feels great. all of them are marked read.
I wonder if Inbox Zero is a worthwhile goal.<p>My inbox is effectively one of my to-do lists. Since I don't cross off everything on my to-do list each day, my inbox usually has a few dozen messages. I have found that when I move an email to a "check later" folder, I never do so.
My problem with solutions like this is that they never seem to fit any other people's methods of working. Saying things like "Only check e-mail twice per day" is not going to work for 95% of the people that are reading this (rough guess).<p>If I only checked email twice per day, I'd just end the day with 500 emails that need responding to all in one bunch. On top of that, many of them would no longer be timely, disrupting other people's days and slowing others down.<p>Am I alone in thinking like this?
edit: for those thinking that unsubscribe is a good idea. it's not. changing your email to a junkmail email before unsubscribing from services you don't need anymore is a better approach<p>for mutt users this is really easy to accomplish even with many mail accounts. create a macro file eg. ~/.mutt/macros:<p><pre><code> # have to be sourced on folder hooks
macro index,pager ,a "<save-message>=$my_account_name/archive<return>"
macro index,pager ,p "<save-message>=$my_account_name/pending<return>"
macro index,pager gi "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/inbox<enter>" "Go to inbox"
macro index,pager ga "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/archive<enter>" "Go to archive"
macro index,pager gp "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/pending<enter>" "Go to pending"
macro index,pager gs "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/sent<enter>" "Go to Sent Mail"
macro index,pager gd "<change-folder>=$my_account_name/drafts<enter>" "Go to drafts"
# vim: syntax=muttrc
</code></pre>
now in your account hook do the following:<p><pre><code> folder-hook gmail \
' \
set my_account_name=gmail ;\
source ~/.mutt/macros ;\
....
</code></pre>
afterwards type `T*,aG` and all your current email will be archived. from then on you can use the quick bindings for accessing all your mail with those shortcuts
Another recommendation I would make (either to get to zero or get yourself to stay there) is to pre-commit to your goal using Beeminder (<a href="http://www.beeminder.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.beeminder.com</a>), which will make you pay money if you don't hit a target each day. (Don't worry, it only counts "read" emails so you don't have to worry about emails coming in and causing you to go off track)
One <i>great</i> way I have found is to filter all emails with 'unsubscribe' into a separate folder for reading later using this:<p>`Matches: ("opt-out" OR unsubscribe OR "viewing the newsletter" OR "privacy policy" OR enews OR "edit your preferences" OR "email notifications" OR "update profile" OR smartunsubscribe OR secureunsubscribe OR yahoogroups OR "manage your account" OR "group-digests")`<p>It really helps cut down unproductive emails
Michael, what if I told you not only you wouldn't need to overly focus on hitting inbox zero but never have to use email again?<p>Intentdo was created for busy people like yourself and for the minimalists alike. It works outside the scope of email, it doesn't try to solve the 'problem' of email, it simply gives you a different paradigm by letting you ask to be sent intents rather than emails.<p>How?<p>The format:
Intents are quick and encourage clarity.
Own your time, welcome intents when you want to.
If you choose to answer, a yes-maybe-no does it.
This is intent-like: Intention + 4 actions, 250max<p>Here's the answer to your main concerns:<p>1. "Have a method for writing emails (on both my phone and computer) without checking them"<p>The method is the very intent's format to draft a new intent.<p>"Without checking them" is the Waiting list where you see (if you happen to open it) whose intents are waiting to be welcomed by you thus unlocking its content. Good thing is, you decide when to.<p>2. "...triage frequent mail sources that I want records of, but never want in my inbox (e.g. certain reports, shipping confirmations for online shopping, etc.)"<p>Even though Intentdo is only a week old, we're already working to launch upcoming features that will give you what you could say it's a Pinterest for your Dropbox. Interfacing with email, Intentdo not only will inspect your inbox (with your permission) for the services you're subscribed for and want to get notifications of but will organize your files for you.<p>I'd love you and everyone here to try and start asking people to send you intents rather than emails. I'd love also to know how you feel about it. To me, it's all about the liberating feeling of coming back to owning my own time, but most importantly, the great calming ripple effect it creates by encouraging clarity through the format which brings people to think thoroughly and edit what they're saying. Three words: Clarity. Integrity. Simplicity.<p>www.intentdo.com , invite code "replace-emails".<p>Send me intents at ^frank.<p>Note: just found out about grouper here. It sounds great.
Invite accepted!
As of yesterday I've been at Inbox Zero for 47 days. Before that my longest streak was 8 days. For me Inbox Zero is all about not having loose ends at the end of the day.<p>How I did it: 1) liberal unsubscribe. 2) ruthless delete. 3) scheduled time on my calendar to reply.<p>I remember on day 26 one message I didn't want to deal with stuck in my inbox. At the thought of breaking the streak I re-read the message and scheduled 30 minutes the following morning to reply.
I'm making a to-do list for Gmail as a browser extension. It'll be free and I should have screenshots up in the next week if time allows. If you're interested, get on the list here:<p><a href="http://toduh.com" rel="nofollow">http://toduh.com</a>
There was a discussion of Andreas Klinger's system that also included a Google Apps script for catching emails you forgot to mark as needing a response. I can't find it though - anyone have the link?
If you don't have any concerns regarding privacy or security, use Mailbox app <a href="http://www.mailboxapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mailboxapp.com/</a> I do #inboxzero very easily and it's so piece of cake, I don't need to write blog post about to tell how I did it.
Inbox zero is meaningless. It doesn't matter how many emails you have in your inbox; what really matters is to get to the important stuff first! So prioritisation is the key!