[matkam]

I too practice "inbox 0," and making sure I am very diligent about unsubscribing from mailing lists and creating the occasional filter. I am completely content with email, and I feel like this is more for people who never hit the "archive" button. This is why I use stock gmail over Dropbox's Mailbox. And I am afraid that if I start using Google's Inbox, my inbox will just get cluttered and I won't be able to go back.

[DINKDINK]

can you explain to me the advantage of archiving a message over just letting it rest in a read state in your inbox? I've never been able to see an added value to it.

[bendyorke]

I have two groups of emails: "professional" and "online" ones. I'll "inbox 0" my "professional" emails, archiving, deleting, and snoozing emails. For my "online" emails, I don't do any management, it's just a giant inbox of every email I've received.

The advantage I find to archiving messages is just a slight psychological boost. When the inbox is empty, I know I have nothing to do. If I have <20 emails (I always try to keep these inboxes under 20), I can see everything I have to do. As I work my way through the list, it's obvious visual feedback that I'm making progress. Just little things that I feel slightly improve my experience.

Although this only works because I have my other massive "online" inbox :D

[gknoy]

What do you do about long-duration TODO items, like "Fix XYZ bug", which are a lower priority than your current tasks? I tend to Star those in Gmail, and leave them read but not-archived.

Some of these threads (for me) are good explanations/resources about a particular problem, but which I can't act on yet as $OtherTask is higher priority. I have Jira tickets for most of these, but even so the inbox helps remind me (roughly monthly) that things are still Not Fixed, whereas a TODO label would end up being unread.

Maybe it's just that I've been depending on that and have NOT been using a TODO or similar label for things, and thus am not in the habit of checking for New Things in my filtered labels. I'll have to think about this more. Thanks in advance for your insight. :)

[TheRealDunkirk]

You've elucidated the reason I just bought OmniFocus. I need a system outside of all other systems to keep track of it all. I have 4 separate email systems to keep track of. Google's tool won't help me with 2 of them (or a ticketing system, or whatever). I used a web-based TODO manager for years, but I finally spent the money to get a native application. The integration of highlighting something -- in any app, or an email, or a web page -- and then hitting a keystroke to capture it, and give it a to-do, has proven pretty effective to me. THAT'S my inbox, and THAT'S the one place I check when I need to find something to do.

[cpuguy83]

It's completely mental (not as in crazy, as in it's a mental issue). I like to keep things tidy, if something is in my inbox then it's something that needs to be dealt with.

[Lewisham]

Read state shouldn't be overloaded with "still to ToDo", otherwise you don't really know how many ToDo items you have vs those you haven't triaged yet.

[grayclhn]

The value can be small (or nonexistent), but I like to know that everything in my inbox needs to be acted on/processed, rather than having to determine whether I've already done it or not. You can do this while leaving everything in the inbox by toggling the read/unread tags, but I'd rather not.

Similarly, I've never seen the advantage of leaving old emails in my inbox rather than just archiving everything without labeling it.

[DINKDINK]

ah, my approach has been anything in my inbox that is unread is either requiring of action on it, or unread.

[organsnyder]

The problem I have when I've used that strategy is that then I need to skim all of the emails and recall the state of each one. I find it to be both distracting and stressful—I'm reminded of every task I need to accomplish (or, at least, the most recent 20) whenever I check my email.

For my work email, I try to practice inbox-0. Every message either gets an immediate action, or it's filed away as a task on my todo list (including the URL for the message in Gmail), and then archived.

[lmm]

It's just a third state. I use unread for "not started", read-but-in-inbox for "in progress" and archived for "done". If you don't need that distinction between not started and in progress then sure, just leave it all read in your inbox.

[prawn]

Same goes for "starring for to-do" vs "unread as to-do". The latter does mix in requires-action with yet-to-read, but maybe a lot of us class a yet-to-read email as requiring an action anyway?

[aiiane]

I'm curious why you think Inbox would result in your inbox getting cluttered. From how you describe your workflow, Inbox would work well for you.

[matkam]

Well you're right. I've been using Inbox for over a week, and I like it. No email clutter, and it matches my flow pretty well.