[ryandrake]

I've never actually achieved Zero Inbox, but I'm pretty close. One thing that helps is to create meaningful, actionable folders for your E-mails. I have these:

    Urgent: Follow-up today in person
    Follow-up today by E-mail
    Follow-up this week
    Waiting for non-urgent response
    Hound (for people who take constant babysitting, I'll send request daily until it's responded to)
    Watch (if thread is replied to, I'll need to be on it)
    Archive (all resolved items)
    Ignored (no interest to me and no response needed)

I've got a few others but these are the ones I use the most. My workflow is to skim my new messages. Reply to the ones that can be quickly addressed, and file the rest into these folders to be reviewed at an appropriate time (generally by EOD).

I try to address all questions to me by EOD before I let myself go home. Because I don't like That Guy Who Doesn't Respond To E-mails, I try to set a good example and not be that guy.

[kilroy123]

What I do is, use a filter for any email that contains the word "Unsubscribe" from it. Have it skip the inbox and live under a label.

This pretty much filters all non-important emails. It's amazing.

[jackgolding]

This is brilliant

[wyclif]

"Inbox Zero for Life" is the best actionable guide I've found for processing email:

https://xph.us/2013/01/22/inbox-zero-for-life.html

Your one and only goal for processing your inbox is to make it empty. Not to actually do anything productive, because processing email is inherently anti-productive. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing work here. Just get it over with as quickly as possible.

[BN1978]

I like your system for emails. You inspired me to do add to my Trello list: "Try ryandrake system for my inbox."

[JW_00000]

You've just added an item to your to-do list to organize your to-do list. Isn't this the exact thing the article was criticising?

> "This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’"

[BN1978]

The article has a right to its opinion. I don't agree with all in the article. In the real life, most of the time, the truth isn't black or white. Is improving my organization/time-management system really kind of procrastination? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Again, it depends.

[Symbiote]

I have a croon job, which adds "reorganise Trello to do list" to my Trello to do list.

The point being, I'm only to do this once a month. I have a few other similar ones, where I was procrastinating with tasks, but now only do them once per period.

[Niten]

I do something similar, but at an even lower granularity: "Needs Action", "Waiting", and just a couple other labels.

I haven't actually watched Mann's talks and only have a second-hand understanding of Inbox Zero as a concept, so maybe this is just rehashing his ideas, but the reason I like this approach is that I avoid spending the time and mental effort classifying incoming messages more than once.