Four years later I have finally hit "inbox 0"

Despite the relative ease it did not happen overnight… I have been working to get to my email down for many months now realizing my email owned me. How could I be dominated by my inbox? Arg, forget that, it was time to take control.

First let me paint a little picture of life before 0 as I am guessing this may still apply to many of you. My inbox sat at around 1500+ items. Let’s break that down a bit: around 1400 read but not filed, 50-60 unread, and the remainder flagged for various actions. When going to my inbox it was always a “hmm where to start?” kind of thought process. Do I take a look at some of these old flags and see why I thought they were so important? Do I start at the top (most recent) and work my way down? Much like the video describes your spend too much time thinking and filing and not enough doing.

Time to take control. First I took all of my unread emails and archived them. With Gmail the search feature rocks so pulling the proverbial needle from the haystack is surprisingly easy. Next I took all of my flags and determined which were truly important and deleted the rest. I now use Remember the Milk to keep track of my to do’s. Now I was down to around 50 emails and feeling pretty good about myself. I scanned those and deleted or archived what I could and responded to anything that was quick.

The remaining 35 emails were harder to get rid of. These were emails I wanted to reference or needed more thought to respond to. I needed to change my thought process here as in the past if I moved it from my inbox that meant it was done. I set up a ‘resources’ folder (label if online) and moved what I could there and then gradually started working down the others. As I said it took me some time becuase as Newman knows 'the email never stops' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL6ubXD9ZjY

I can’t begin to describe how happy I am to have taken on this battle. My wife Karen can attest to the amount of time I have spent over the years trying to deal with my inbox. It is such a great feeling to have conquered my inbox. If you haven’t done it already I most certainly recommend it. I am more responsive to emails, have more time to spend on business development and am not daunted by a visit to the inbox. Heck… now I even have time to write a post every now and again! Two parting words: own it.