Zero Inbox Wastes Time
Zero Inbox Wastes Time

How cluttered email can actually be more efficient

At this moment, I have 6809 messages in the inbox for my 9to5 job, and 4,202 of them are unread. The very idea makes my friend Heather shudder in horror. But I don’t miss important messages, I can generally find what I need, and I don’t waste time trying to clean up email.

If having 6,000 emails in your inbox would give you palpitations, you probably have a working system in place.

If, however, you lose things in your cluttered email or feel guilty for not living up to the Zero Inbox standard, I have a system that will help you feel more in control and allow you to let go of impossible perfectionism.

Why Zero Inbox is Difficult (or Impossible to Achieve)

Sheer volume. I sampled my office email from the last semester and found that I have about 200 email threads updated daily. That doesn’t include the messages coming into Messy Desk Consulting or to the Gmail account I use for shopping and “free” downloads.

I must not be the only one. According to The Radicati Group, over 306 billion emails will be sent & received per day in 2020.

If I set a goal to read, process, delete, store, forward, or reply to every one of those messages, I could easily spend most days working with nothing but email, and I would be completing less than a third of my actual job.

AI isn’t doing it. Marketing floods our inboxes daily. In my personal accounts, I take advantage of Gmail’s AI features that sort Social, Updates, Forums, Promotions, and Spam, but those results aren’t consistent enough to do what I need at work. It simply isn’t acceptable for a message from the President of my college to show up in “forums” alongside true forums I use for professional development. For me, there is no point in having the filter if I need to check it daily to keep up with important mail.

You are supposed to be able to train the AI to sort as you prefer. Now, I may just be a bad trainer (my dog’s behavior would support that hypothesis), but I cannot seem to make Google remember what I tell it. Just when I get all the marketing separated from invoices, some update or slip of the mouse messes up the system.

Tips for Managing the Cluttered Inbox

Casey Botticello gives some great tips in his post about spending less time on emails. There are three ideas from his piece that are particularly applicable to having a productively cluttered inbox.

Use automated responses and templates. The automated responses are fairly commonplace now, but the templates in Gmail are a bit hidden, so read his instructions on how to set them up.

Seriously, the templates can be life-changing. The last time I hired someone, the “Thanks, but no thanks” template cut the time needed at least in half. (It also kept me from sending snarky replies to people who think that “loving books” qualifies them for a library position requiring a master’s degree.)

Manage your subscriptions. Yep, use that unsubscribe button on marketing emails. If you are in a position like mine where buying is part of your job and the marketing might be useful, see if your marketer has segments of emails you can unsubscribe from.

Make use of starring and labeling emails. This is the final note I’m picking up from Boticelli. (hey, I’m a librarian — I’ve lectured undergraduates about plagiarism since before most of you were born. Over-zealous citation is in my blood.) In the process I describe below, you’ll see how I use these to my advantage.

Tiptoe through the Messy Mailbox

Rather than create a listicle telling you about my amazing mailbox tricks, I’m going to show you what I do when I sort my email throughout the day.

Yeh, I’m not a one-time-a-day emailer, and I do check my email first thing in the morning. I turn off notifications, but I glance at mail whenever I am shifting from one task to another throughout the day. I like breaking the time management guru’s rules (selectively).

My morning email routine goes like this:
['Marie Jones']
['Technology', 'Email', 'Productivity Hacks', 'Gmail', 'Time Management']