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by andybak 1817 days ago
OK. (on a side note this is "Inbox bundles" solved elegantly in Google Inbox RIP)

Anyway - I too have an overflowing inbox. I used to aim for Inbox zero but slipped and am living with it.

One discipline I do maintain though is that the Inbox should always be actionable. It's my todo list.

So - how do I handle non-actionable, non-urgent stuff?

1. If it will be urgent and actionable I snooze it. 2. If it's of interest but not urgent and has a web representation then I open a browser tab for later.

Newsletters nearly always fall into category 2. Unless I can just skim them for interesting links and archive them.

And a lot of the time I unsubscribe - as soon as I realise I don't really want to read it. I get most of my news from HN or various subreddits.

I think there's about 3 or 4 regular newsletters I tolerate. And I'm more tolerant of infrequent emails (new features for products I'm interested in etc)

2 comments

Google Inbox was fantastic, I miss it. Still, not as good UX as Inoreader for reading newsletters.

Also, I find it healthy to keep things I *have* to process (email, to-do lists) separate from things that I scan for interesting stuff when I have a moment to spare (RSS, Twitter, HN, Instapaper).

> I think there's about 3 or 4 regular newsletters I tolerate.

Maybe you'd be willing to tolerate more if you kept them out of your inbox ;)

The problem with newsletters of all sorts is that they end up in some sort of someday (but probably not) category whether they're explicitly filtered or not. Sometimes they end up in a Gmail tab that I mostly glance at infrequently. If I explicitly filter, I mostly stop looking at the filtering filter. I admit I used to use RSS a lot but these days mostly expect to find plenty of stuff through Twitter, HN, etc.