10 Inbox zero: updates

It has been three weeks since I started maintaining Inbox zero, and I am happy to have been successful so far, everyday, without fail. Hat-tip to Merlin Mann. In any case, I thought it was time to quickly update you on the current status of my new habit.

My approach turned out to be a little different from what I previously outlined (rather roughly). I now have a three–folder system as opposed to the one–folder routine I had suggested: there is a storage folder, a waiting folder and a references folder.

The most important e-mails (so far less than a handful) which I will need in the lengthy future, membership numbers, flight bookings etc. go into the references folder. They usually have a timespan of months. E-mails which need my attention but take longer than a couple of minutes to address, go into my waiting folder. And e-mails that take a couple of minutes or less to attend to, in line with David Allen’s GTD, are immediately attended to and moved to my storage folder, which, as you probably guessed, is akin to my archives. Everything else gets deleted, and flags are used as appropriate. Every e-mail, at some point, will ultimately go into my storage folder.

I do the filing on my iPhone. I use the stock mail app (and the stock app on my Mac as well) and have set up left swiping for flagging and trashing, with right swiping for moving into a folder. Once mails are trashed, flagged or attended to and filed away, I simply bulk select and move all the leftovers to storage.

So far this has proven to be a sound, efficient and effective approach. My unsubscribing spree, which I detailed in my last post, has paid off of course. Fewer e-mails to deal with make it that much pleasanter to deal with the e-mails I do get. And then there’s the thing about reducing FoMO by reducing subscriptions.