This is something I learned recently and instantly impressed by it. If you are like me, we have been practicing this for long. A bit of FOMO(Fear of missing out) involved in this. This is specially useful when you are working from home and make sure that you want to get maximum done within your productive hours and give your family some time. This will help you cut down the productive time by a good percentage without making you check your mails every 30 sec. Interested? Read on.
Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.
Inbox Zero is a staple of digital productivity advice. “Achieving Inbox Zero” is the knowledge worker’s equivalent of “reaching enlightenment.” But Inbox Zero doesn’t mean having an empty inbox—it’s all about reducing the stress of email and be more effective in handling the action items.
Focus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later.
I reckon that my biggest “secret” to inbox zero is no secret at all. It’s based heavily on David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, and consists primarily of quickly answering a few escalating questions about each email message in my inbox:
- What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
- What action, if any, does this message require of me?
- What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?
Not very earth-shattering stuff until you consider how much of the crap in your own inbox may never have been subjected to these simple filters.
Fifty percent or more of your mail may not make it past the first question: delete. A majority of the remainder may not make it past the second (beyond perhaps a one- or two-line reply). And, God willing, you’ll eventually get really fast at dispensing the rest with quick application of the third. The key is to get super-fast at turning valuable messages into actions or placeholders for action. I’ll say it again:
You’re in the business of making sandwiches — not deciding the prettiest way to stack the customers’ orders.
Notice in particular, that each of these three questions frames your activity around the best use of your interest, time, and attention. You’re mentally filtering each message — turning it like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle — to see whether it has a fit in your world right now. It only gets a train ticket to Actionville on your say-so. Don’t fill that train with hobos and freeloaders.
So, go. Look through your pile right now. How many messages don’t even make it past the first question? How many can you delete right this second? Set a timer for ten minutes, and try to process one screenful — two if you can manage it — and see how you do. Remember, this is your decision-making and priorities that govern the attention each message gets, not the fact that the request on your time simply exists in the world; that’s probably the thinking that got you here, right?
This doesn’t make you an impatient jerk. It just means that you’ve learned what happens when you don’t put a value on your own time and attention; you can’t afford to say “yes” to every item that’s lobbed over your transom.
Focus on finding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.
Do you have a sloppy relationship with the messages in your life? Be honest. Do you tend to see every new email as a virtual hug that must be reciprocated? Do you keep emails in your inbox for weeks or months even though you know in your heart of hearts that you have no intention of ever responding to them? If so, it’s dragging you down if you ever hope to hit “zero” in this lifetime. Mentioned briefly yesterday, it bears repeating: delete, my friend. Delete, delete, delete.
The first and most workmanlike filter in your email processing scheme must involve very quickly deciding whether a given message can be deleted or archived immediately upon receipt. This, Grasshopper, is the dirtiest of dirty little secrets in the “Inbox Zero” fu book. Because once you can reduce the amount of hay in your particular stack, the needles start revealing themselves like shiny little diamonds. Kill junk, kill pseudo-junk, and then kill all the stuff you won’t ever respond to. Whatever’s left is yours to return. That’s where your actual, useful job lives.
Why Inbox Zero Matters
If you’ve got any interest in taming your inbox or more generally in being efficient and productive, Inbox Zero is something you need to know about. Inbox Zero is a Big Thing that has been around since 2006. It’s been the subject of many presentations and books.
There are ten articles in the Inbox Zero series, most of which deal with techniques for handling email efficiently. They’re interesting and useful, and we encourage you to read them if you haven’t before.
But the heart of Inbox Zero is not these practical tips. It’s not even about having zero emails in your inbox, despite the name.
Inbox Zero Isn’t About Having an Empty Inbox
If you assumed “Inbox Zero” meant having zero emails in your inbox, don’t worry because you’re not alone. We searched the web for “What is Inbox Zero?” and found many websites that say Inbox Zero is all about having an empty inbox.
They are all incorrect.
The whole point of Inbox Zero is that email is a never-ending stream. An empty inbox is only ever temporary, so making an empty inbox your target is a fool’s errand. You’re at the mercy of other people sending you mail. The only certain way to have an empty inbox is to block all email, which is functionally the same as not having an inbox at all.
Or, to keep your inbox at zero, you might have to watch it like a hawk and deal with each email the instant it comes in.
This is unrealistic.
Instead, the Inbox Zero philosophy assumes that your inbox is a source of stress. Inbox Zero seeks to make it less stressful and to take up as little of your focus as possible. That’s why all the practical tips are about making it easier to deal with your email and automating things.
Here’s what Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero website—now sadly offline but still available in archived form—said about Inbox Zero:
How to Achieve Inbox Zero
Ultimately, like all good philosophies, Inbox Zero is an attitude and a state of mind rather than a set of specific actions. There’s no particular set of steps for achieving Inbox Zero any more than there is for attaining enlightenment.
That’s not to say that following the practical tips Mann gives you for dealing with your mail won’t end up with you having a literally empty inbox—far from it! For most people, the least stressful inbox is an empty inbox, and more power to you if you’ve managed it. But tomorrow it will have mail in it again.
Mann suggests practical actions like setting filters, using canned responses, and moving mail to different folders as part of a methodology for lowering the stress email can cause. An empty inbox is merely a potential side-effect of this methodology, not the ultimate aim.
The ultimate aim is that your inbox isn’t a source of stress.
So, if you ever hear people saying that Inbox Zero is unrealistic or unachievable, you can be sure they haven’t understood it. It’s not about having no emails. It’s about having no stress from emails.
That’s why we recommend using OHIO (Only Handle It Once) to triage your emails. Rather than focusing on a nebulous goal of “Inbox Zero”—something that is often misinterpreted—only handling emails once will save you time and stress. Focusing on OHIO will bring you closer to the actual philosophy of Inbox Zero.
But if you’ve got an inbox with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of emails in it, you need a way to get things under control. “Inbox Zero,” which aims to keep your inbox empty, is trendy—but we have a superior solution.
We’re going to focus on a system known as OHIO, or “Only Handle It Once,” but not in a way that many people have misinterpreted it. OHIO is an information management principle that put simply, says you should only handle information the smallest number of times that is required—ideally once. As an efficiency aide, this is very useful. But, as with all good ideas, some people have taken it to extremes and preached OHIO as a golden rule that must be taken literally. This is both unnecessary and counter-productive, especially when it comes to dealing with email.
What Does “OHIO” Mean?
“Only Handle It Once” doesn’t mean that you should read an email once and never reread it—that doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes you need to read an email several times to understand it, especially if the person sending it doesn’t understand brevity. OHIO also doesn’t mean you should never see the contents of the email again once it’s left the inbox. That doesn’t make sense either because it forces you to respond to every email then and there, with no thought given to your current priorities or responsibilities.
What “Only Handle It Once” does mean is that you should only deal with an email in your inbox once. After you’ve understood the email, you should deal with it—“handle it”—and then either delete or archive it. You might see the information in the email many more times as part of a to-do list task or in preparation for a meeting, but you should never see the email in your inbox again. You Only Handle It Once.
Why Is OHIO Useful?
OHIO is pretty simple to understand, but why do we recommend it? What’s the benefit of only dealing with an email in your inbox once? Well, the answer is straightforward: Your inbox is not an archive, a bin, a filing cabinet, or a dumping ground. It’s an inbox!
When you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox, they quickly get buried—and out of sight is out of mind. It’s much harder to find specific emails, it makes your mail client work more slowly (even if you access your email through a browser like Gmail), and it uses up your storage (which is a particular problem if you use the Outlook or Apple Mail apps in your phone).
The bottom line: There’s no point keeping all of your emails in your inbox and plenty of good reasons not to. “Only Handle It Once” is a system that encourages you to do something with an email once you’ve read it—to handle it—and whether you ultimately archive the email or delete the email, it won’t stay in your inbox.
What Does “Handle” Mean, Exactly?
“Handle” means that once you’ve understood the email, you do one or more of the following things:
- Reply to the email.
- Forward the email.
- Organize a meeting about the email.
- Turn the email into a to-do list item.
- Do nothing (if none of the four options above are needed)
After you’ve done whatever you need to do with the email, you either delete the email or archive it. You do not leave the email in your inbox once you’ve handled it.
Don’t have time to handle an email right now? That’s fine—you’re not pursuing Inbox Zero, and a lingering email in your inbox isn’t a failure, only a task you haven’t tackled yet. Just make sure to handle the email when you have a minute.
Get less mail
The easiest trick to finding more needles in a haystack is to resist the urge to add unnecessary hay.
Mailing lists, cron jobs, and other robot messages
Consider whether your current collection of elective mailing lists and email notifications has any fat you can trim. Can anything be converted to daily or weekly digests? Can you filter any of the non-critical stuff to get marked as read and then get shunted straight into archives or sub-directories for later perusal and searching? Maybe think about canceling as much stuff as you can stand, and then, after a week or two, return and add back just the ones you really need or most enjoy.
Mail from people
It’s trickier to thin the amount of email you get from carbon-based bipeds, but think at a higher level about where you can economize, automate, and filter. For example, if you get a lot of email related to your website, consider adding a web-based form that forces the use of a Subject and encourages your corresponding strangers to keep it short and focused.
Of course, the lion’s share of your actionable email will continue to come from work projects and friends, so you may feel like you have relatively little leeway here. Candidly, the easiest trick here may just be to respond less. I’m not saying you should ignore people or blow off clients, but consider the cues that instant, frequent, detailed responses relay to people; one of the best ways to suggest that you want to receive less email is to send less as well.
Breaking the news
And if you’re getting boatloads of frequent and lengthy emails from the same few people, consider discussing it with them offline and in the context of the growing demands on both your time. Tell them you love conversing, but that you but need to dial things down a little.
We both get so much email these days that I worry some stuff might be falling between the cracks. Can we agree to compile all our questions and links into one daily email unless there’s an emergency?
We get what we’re willing to put up with in this world, and whether the volume’s coming from your boss or your aunt, there may actually be ways you can improve the health of your relationship (as well as career) by just being honest in the nicest way possible.
That devil, spam
You’ll notice I’ve left spam out of this equation because it’s kind of a separate problem from the largely human-generated messages. Still, it doesn’t go without saying: install and configure the most brutal spam filtering your career can tolerate. If you’re still getting more than a few random spam mails each day, something needs to change. The technology’s come a long way in the last 3 years and there’s no need (or excuse) to suffer in silence. (More on spam)
Keep less mail (with less futzing)
Some people get really attached to their email. They feel that preserving a 100% record of every communication gives them power, access, and a low-level guarantee of perpetual CYA. Maybe that’s a good thing. Or maybe that’s just a big, nasty, constantly-refreshed pile of Viparinama-dukkha. Bottom line, in either case: if you’re spending more than a few minutes a day filing your email into nested folders or some kind of byzantine system of your own design, you’re probably wasting a lot of time.
Modern email clients like Gmail, Mail.app, and Windows’ Google desktop search make it very easy to search every email you’ve ever gotten, so if you can’t bear to throw something out, consider just throwing it into one big “Archives” folder and then forgetting about it.
If you discover an actual real-world, non-fantasy need for more than one folder, be very picky about letting your system get at all complicated. Remember how David Allen says to do physical filing: A-Z with the least futzing possible. Between sorting, searching, and Smart Folders, you probably have all the tools you need to keep one archive folder and only one archive folder.
Respond now (or never)
I’m willing to risk repeating myself on this one, because I think it’s worth the emphasis.
The only way an email will ever get out of your life (and out of your worrying brain) is to either deal with it or get rid of it. If you’re planning to do anything in-between, you should have an explicit understanding of why you’re doing so. Any idea which one of these is a particularly shitty idea?
- I don’t have time to answer this now (but I will put it in “Respond to” and answer it within X days)
- I just need to save this for future reference (so I’ll just toss it in my Archive)
- I need to convert this into an action by the end of the day (so I’ll put it in my “Daily Pending” folder)
- I’m going to just leave this in my inbox and think about it for a few days. Or months. Or years. Who knows?
Touch everything once whenever possible, but even if you’re busy, take the extra 2 seconds to consider whether this really has any place in your life. If not, just punt it. Article of Faith #5: “Lying to yourself doesn’t empty an inbox.”
‘Nuff said.
Schedule email work — both small and large
Email should not be something you’re always doing. Checking email every :59 seconds is tantamount to washing rice one grain at a time. But, by the same token, you need to be dealing with email often enough — and substantially enough — that you don’t end up with that big old pile again. So consider two time-based adjustments.
First, do limit the number of times you check for and then scan new email throughout each day. I won’t repeat myself at length, but setting a schedule to “do email” once an hour and for just a few minutes will be more than enough contact once you recalibrate. Then return to any processed mail through the day and as time allows to work on quickly banging out responses.
Second, build a time-based levee that won’t let you ever get this behind again. Using something like smart folders, make it easy to quickly determine which emails are collecting dust. Then either delete them or respond to them immediately. You can do this as often as makes sense to you, but your health and sanity will improve if you never see another procrastinated email that’s older than a couple weeks.
Stop thinking of emails like precious family heirlooms, and start treating ’em like pints of milk. Perishable, time-stamped milk that becomes a little less fresh every day until it smells kind of funny and just needs to be dumped. Believe me, there will always be more coming.
Value your time
Platitudes about respecting your time are understandably easy to blow off since they have that citrus-y whiff of “personal development” and “self-help” — summoning the image of a bunch of sandaled guys with droopy mustaches sitting in a circle, talking about their feelings and weeping.
Well, I promise you, this is some serious, practical, non-hippie advice. It’s day-one stuff, kids, because if you don’t learn to value your time, you will quickly find a volunteer army of slackers who will be more than happy to help waste it for you. “Time burglars,” the newly-efficient Bart Simpson might have called them (“You can’t just go off Focusyn!”). Email is the most dependable modern location to witness your time being frittered away by strangers, but you are now officially Vice-President in Charge of Ensuring That Your Time is Not Wasted by Strangers. Congratulations on the promotion.
This also means not half-assing the attention you pay to the task at hand; do email when you do email — don’t just flip through it while thinking about Lost or fretting over your thinning hairline or wondering how you’ll paper train your new Labradoodle, Barney. Take these tasks seriously, and stop depending on email as your fickle source for status, affection, and thumb exercises.
And, friends, whenever you start to notice that the prospect of new email has begun reclaiming bits of your attention while you’re doing other things (yes, there actually are other things), fight the urge to tear ass over to your email program “just to check in.” You’ll only get good at this stuff when you have the presence of mind to notice, acknowledge, and combat the behaviors that got you in a bad way in the first place.
Core Intensity 