
Ride the inbox zero train - AndrewWarner
http://savagethoughts.com/post/1351262629/5-ways-to-ride-the-inbox-zero-train
======
roder
Summary:

1\. Write short well-formated emails [ed] see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808059>

2\. Snooze emails - <http://www.followup.cc/> [ed] not a bad idea, but not in
love with forwarding my personal/work emails to a 3rd party

3\. separate tasks from emails [ed] I think the wonderful thing about inbox0
is that with an Action/Waiting folder your emails becomes your task list.

4\. pick up the phone [ed] this works great most of the time, but can also be
a total time sink.

~~~
a-priori
_2\. Snooze emails -<http://www.followup.cc/> [ed] not a bad idea, but not in
love with forwarding my personal/work emails to a 3rd party_

My first thought reading this is that it Gmail should have a similar feature
that says "Remind me at X time _unless this thread becomes active again_ ".

Fairly often, I send an email expecting a reply and don't want to forget about
it if I don't get one. But I also don't want to either a) keep the thread in
my inbox or b) make a task/calendar event to track it.

------
dools
Is this an evil cross post? I put this on Chris' blog comments:

I use a bit of a hodge podge of rules and systems, too. When an email comes in
I apply the "2 minute rule". If it's 2 minutes or less to reply or do whatever
needs to be done, it gets done right away. Any longer than that and I reply to
the person who sent it and BCC in my Highrise dropbox and "task" dropbox -
that way a task gets added (I usually have to modify the subject line of the
email so that the task looks right in Highrise) and I also have reference to
the entire email through highrise in the search. When I reply, I tell the
person when I will get to it, and that determines the task dropbox I use in
Highrise - ie. if I'm going to get to it today, I BCC my "today" dropbox, if
I'm going to get to it tomorrow, this week or next week etc.

If the task has a specific time and date I either add it in Highrise or if I'm
on the move, I add it as a TODO or meeting entry on my Nokia which then uses
GooSync to Sync up to my Google Calendar.

If the email is something that I can't schedule or reply to immediately, I
save it in a folder with a priority, "p1", "p2" etc. If I've got a bunch of
emails in p1 etc. I'll send an email to my Highrise dropbox for later on
(tomorrow, thisweek, nextweek etc) to review that inbox so that I don't forget
I've got stuff sitting there (I read my email in Pine so I don't have a
"folder list" sitting there).

If the email is personal and one that will take longer than 2 minutes to
respond to, I save it in "letters" which I usually go through once every few
weeks on a weekend when I feel like doing some long form communications :)

Additionally I block off some time in my Calendar each week to ensure I review
all inboxes and task lists in Highrise to ensure nothing slips through the
cracks, and sometimes on a Monday I'll spend a good 2 hours getting a bunch of
random inbox cruft out of the way before I start work.

This is all geared towards being able to deal with prioritisation on the fly
when I'm deep in the coding zone or working to a deadline with lots of
peripheral things like support requests, sales calls, proposals etc. that
still have to get done.

The most important thing is having somewhere to stick anything that comes in
so that you will always get to it later, and that the time you get to it is
going to be appropriate to the task (ie. no point in reviewing an email 3
months down the track that was requesting a quote for a site to be deployed
next week!)

------
sp4rki
I take 5 minutes each hour or two to check my emails and respond as fast as
possible to respond-able items (and archiving them right away), move
actionable items to my to-do list (again archiving them right away, though
sometimes keeping info on my to-do app), and trash all
unrequested/notreallyinterested emails ASAP.

Aside, my inbox always has from 0 to 10 items in it, which I think this is
more then manageable. Items may include threaded conversation though, so it
could very well be 9 items and 30 items in one slot. I keep some emails in my
inbox because I haven't been able to close the particular conversation. If
we're discussing something that I can't take action on I just leave it there
until I wrap the communication.

My emails are 90% of the time two or three sentences long. If I can answer
with a 'yes' or a 'no' I will. Most people I correspond with also know that I
have a very short attention span with email content so they also keep it as
short as possible. I tend to just not respond amazingly long emails.

tl;dr Just go over the list as fast as you can deleting as much as possible
first, archiving as much as possible second and then taking direct action on
the emails themselves. And keep it short (which I see the irony of since this
comment is magnitudes too long).

PD: Oh and I disagree with the phone. Generally it's a way to extend
conversations and wastes time and productivity.

------
awa
I have been striving towards joining the inbox zero train, All my mails from
the last month has either been converted to tasks or filed in some way.

The only noticeable improvement I have seen is that I go thorough all my
emails (I might have ignored a few whose subject line didn't catch my
attention in the past) making me catch some semi-important things I might have
missed.

Unfortunately filing in Outlook has its disadvantages as search only works on
the whole mailbox or one folder at a time, hence if a mail can be categorized
in 2 folders, you might have to search twice (which looks stupid when someone
is standing over your head).

------
markbao
6\. Set aside 1 hour sometime this week to go through your emails and kill
them.

Seeing and thinking "1 - 100 of hundreds" is psychologically tiring. Get it
off your mind. Set aside an hour sometime this week and get through it all.
Set an appointment in MobileMe or Google Calendar or whatever. You might not
want to inbox zero right this moment—that's okay. Just postpone it, but get it
done.

------
pinko
Sanebox has a nice implementation of the "Hit the snooze button" idea (just
tag/refile to SaneLater and it will reappear in your inbox later). Feels great
to punt on some emails.

~~~
StuartRoseman
actually you put the email into either @SaneTomorrow or @SaneNextWeek
depending on whether you want it to reappear in your Inbox tomorrow morning or
Monday morning. But it is a cool feature :-)

------
mcknz
The only benefit listed here is "the mysteriously wonderful feeling." More
often I get the "slowly sinking feeling" of having deleted an important email.

Storage is so cheap now that saving thousands of messages is not really a big
deal, and it's often useful to be able to search through everything you've
written or received.

~~~
helmut_hed
Presumably the OP is suggesting that one's _inbox_ be of zero length, not that
you actually delete the message... File emails you wish to retain in a
suitable folder - they'll be waiting for you when you need them.

~~~
mcknz
yes, but you still need to make a decision to file/delete. If I don't
immediately know what do to with an email I just let it sit there or I flag
it.

Nothing wrong with zero inbox, but if it makes you spend too much time
agonizing over every email, it's not really helping.

------
code_duck
I think his short bio at the top explains how this is achieved.

------
ergo98
"Pick up the phone

I find it surprising how out-of-vogue the phone is — so much stuff is just
faster on the phone!"

As a general rule I very strongly disagree with this.

The phone is a good tool if you enjoy revisiting the same discussion again,
and again, and again, each time with a "telephone game" (there's a reason it
was named such) misinterpretation of everything that was previously discussed.

Sure, there are appropriate discussions that can take place over the phone,
but in this industry it's usually a good interpersonal vehicle, but a
horrendous way of coming to decisions or communicating ideas.

~~~
sp4rki
You're so correct. Why use the phone when I can answer on my terms and time
with a two sentence answer in less than 10 seconds. Using the phone takes
those 10 seconds just to call the person. The phone is a tool for emergencies
and to shorten distance, not to make conversations longer than they should be.

~~~
adamtj
When you are one of two or three people in an open ended back-and-forth
conversation, often a 15 minute phone call can save a dozen three paragraph
emails (plus the dozen interruptions) over the course of several hours. You
get your answer sooner, you have fewer total interruptions, and you spend less
time over-explaining, because listeners can instantly indicate their
understanding.

Email is a relatively low-bandwidth channel that's inappropriate for high-
bandwidth problems. Sometimes, a 5 sentence email is great. Other times, you
need phone call. Sometimes, it's worth flying to meet somebody face to face
for an hour.

~~~
sp4rki
That may be so on your case, but I've found in my experience that generally if
a phone call is more productive than email it's because the topic at hand has
not been developed enough to use a quick action based method to deal with the
communication. I believe there are three situations in which a phone call is
better than an email. A sales pitch, which would be a gazillion times more
efficient if done face to face; a brainstorming conversation, which would be a
lot better if it was divided in a solitary work period followed by a
cumulative peer based review in person; and when there's a imperative need to
switch directions ASAP, which will hinder productivity anyways however you
look at it.

Of course your millage may vary and I'm not trying to convince you your're
wrong, specially because you aren't since this is a a topic very influences by
personal preference. I just find that every instance where the telephone could
outdo an email, is because either the parties involved where not properly
prepared with the required resources in their possession, or because the type
of communication was not meant to be written in the first place. Generally
this last type works better in person. Almost always.

