After ten months of a non-empty email inbox, I finally achieved Inbox Zero last week and I’ve managed to clear my inbox every day since. (Because once you get there, it’s easy to clear it, as long as you remain committed.) It seemed like a good day to repeat this blog post I wrote more than five years ago about achieving and maintaining Inbox Zero.
I’ve posted here before about how I achieve Inbox Zero. For years, I had an Inbox Zero habit, so that at the end of the workday, there would be no emails in my inbox. I have to admit that this year I let it slide. In recent months, my goal was 20 emails in my inbox at the end of the day, rather than zero. That proved to be an unsatisfactory goal—it deprived me of the thrill of an empty inbox. Until recently.
Two weeks ago, I emptied my inbox. I made the decisions necessary to move or delete messages. I forwarded some emails to Evernote so I could create reminders and then archived the emails.
Almost without exception, at the end of each day since, I’ve had an empty inbox. (A couple of days I left one or two messages in there to act on in the morning.) This makes the beginning of the day so much easier, since most of the emails that come in before I get up are spam (many them in Italian, weirdly) or news sources I read with my coffee. It’s easy to delete the spam and read, then delete or archive, the news.
I’ve had people scoff when I mention Inbox Zero and how much I enjoy it. I’ve seen organizing experts I respect writing that it’s not an achievable or worthy goal. But I’m here to tell you, my life is so much easier when I maintain my Inbox Zero habit.
Here is why I love emptying my inbox at the end of the day:
The best part is that when I have only one day’s email accumulation, it takes me less than five minutes to empty my inbox on a typical day.
I encourage you to give it a try. If you have a lot of emails in your inbox, here are some ideas for getting down to zero without too much angst.
Trust me, dealing with email is easier with a streamlined inbox. Inbox Zero is not only achievable, it can be easy to maintain when you commit to it. I’m so glad I’m back on track with it.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Tagged with: email, habits, worth repeating
Yes! I’ve been unsubscribing like crazy this year. I’m glad you’re already seeing improvement!
Janine Adams January 13, 2023 01:18 PM
I’m working through all my email inboxes right now to set myself up to get to Inbox Zero. It’ll take some time, but I’m already seeing a vast improvement in my personal email. Something that really helped was to start unsubscribing from emails from retailers.
Phaedra Studt January 13, 2023 12:10 PM