Mission (Im)Possible: Inbox Zero

It is very easy to get your inbox filled with with a ton of email. Some things get through spam filter, some remain unread, some are just plain sketches for the never sent emails. Achieving zero in your inbox is one of the holy grails of the Internet. Even if everything you have in your inbox is important and needs to be read, each and every conversation and offer is an email story of its own. So, we’re going to give you some advice on achieving this mythical state of inbox zero.

Delete

First cut is the hardest. Yes, we advise you to get ruthless with deleting your emails. Yes, there are some things that should not be deleted, and most of them are recent. But go through your inbox history. Download the things you need and delete those ancient messages. There will be several personal emails that you will want to keep (archive them!), but a lot of them will hold no significance after all this time. Check the box and click delete! Do not get stuck in the past!

Unsubscribe

Everybody today offers a subscription. Sure, that can be useful, but when you suddenly have dozens and dozens of subscriptions, it gets messy and crowded. First, cut the ties with those services that you don’t recall subscribing to. Then unsubscribe from the things that you do not use. Then go to those to the debate of “need VS want”. Be ruthless and do not get fooled by shiny, neat and fancy subscribe emails. Leave those that you really need!

Categorize

It does not matter if you create different folders for different emails or different categories or different tags or labels or however your client call them, implement some or all of them if you can. Although you can search through your email, one wrong typo and you get lost. Even if you type correctly there can be a lot of results. Separating emails physically and/or visually in your inbox can shorten your search time significantly. Plus if you are visual type, make your tags colourful, let the inbox be pretty!

Read

Oh the thing called procrastination. You get an email and decide to read it later. Do not do that, or you will end up with a ton of unread email. If you know that you do not need to read that email right now, do one of the steps above. If you do, but do not have a time to answer (meaning, it will take you more than two minutes to answer), read it anyways. Then you can either decide to delete it, or leave it for later. In most email clients you can even mark it unread, or simply add a tag/move it to folder “to answer” or similar. Next time you check in, the message will demand an answer, but this time around, you will not need to read it and you can go straight to answering it!

Separate Business And Private

This one is a tricky one, but it does not have to be. You can do this by simply having two email addresses. Make one official and one private, or you can make your current email one of those and create the other one. Sure, it may be a bit annoying but it can be precious when you need to browse one important business thing among tons of private or the other way around. If you do not want to do that, you can simply go back to advice number 3!

Use Apps – Well Hello Unroll.me!

There are multiple apps that can help you to make sense of your inbox, but what we love is unroll.me. We wrote about it before and even interviewed CEO and founder Josh Rosenwald. However, let’s review what it can do for you. In a way, it can do all the previous steps for you and deliver them to you in one neat action. It will scan your inbox and find all the newsletters you’re subscribed to. You will be able to unsubscribe from them and leave the ones you really want to read. Then you have 2 choices: you can leave the remaining subscriptions as they are, or you can add them to a list called Rollup and get them delivered to you in one place.

Do Not Be Frustrated If Your Inbox Isn’t Zero

Yup, there we said it. Ok, maybe you want empty inbox, but let’s be real, some things need to be there for some time. If you never cleaned your inbox, do not be frustrated while you clean it. It will take some time, but the results will be worth all of your hard work. So do not wait any longer, get dow to business and make your inbox clean!