Inbox 0

Motivation

Every time I opened my inbox in the past I checked and deleted most of the incoming mails but over many years a lot slipped through and cluttered my inbox. Roughly once a year I went through them and managed to delete the majority of them but it was still chaotic and could be organized more efficient. Sounds familiar? In this guide I will share how I got to Inbox 0 and have the process in place to maintain it.

Step 1: Newsletter

I am interested on keeping an eye on the developments in the software engineering space, so I subscribe to a many tech newsletters. They tend to clutter my inbox. Step one for me was setting up a email alias for my newsletter subscriptions with a filter to put them in a newsletter label/folder. Going forward all newsletter will land in that folder.

Going back I searched for each newsletter in my inbox and deleted all of them. In the past I did a ok job on deleting them when I read them or did't find them interesting but over the years a lot of them build up. When I went through them some caught my eye and I was like this sounds interesting I may want to read them in the future but you have to be honest with yourself, that you won't read a years old newsletter if you haven't read it since.

To prevent that my newsletter folder will have a thousand mails in a years time I set up a automation to delete every mail in that folder after 30 days. This reduced my inbox from roughly 1000 mails down to 300.

Step 2: Informational emails

I and you probably too get a lot of notification emails from amazon, your mail carrier, sign in notifications, terms of service updates, and many more. Many of them you can delete straight away and some of them you may want to keep for a couple of days or weeks until the matter is resolved e.g. a open service ticket. It's these emails that often build up and in my case I rarely went back and deleted them. This sparked the idea in my to have a temporary folder for mails that I want to keep for a couple of days, weeks or sometimes even for a few months. A perfect example for this would be the registration confirmation for a marathon I signed up for.

So I once again went through the remaining mails of my inbox and deleted all of the now irrelevant mails and moved the ones that I need for a while in the temporary folder. I am now going through the temporary folder once a month and delete the resolved mails. This got my inbox down to 100 mails and I currently have 17 mails in the temporary folder.

I also adjusted the notification settings of many of my accounts, that only relevant notifications will land in my inbox

Step 3: Personal and important emails

I created a second folder for the few emails I want to keep indefinitely. Most of them are personal email exchanges with family. I went trough the 100 remaining personal and important mails, deleted some of them, others with important documents I saved the attachments in my drive, and moved the remaining 14 to my keep folder. I can now proudly say, that I have 0 mails in my inbox.

Maintaining inbox 0

Once you achieved inbox 0 it's quite easy to maintain it. When you check your inbox you either delete the mail right away, which is most often the case for me, or move them to the temporary folder if you really need the mail in the future or in rare occasions you move it in the keep folder.

The only danger is that you abuse your temporary folder and don't delete the mails when they are resolved. As a rule of thumb I would say that you should not have more than 20 mails in your temporary folder and check it at least monthly.