Health, happiness and the pursuit of an empty inbox

A press release fell into my inbox recently to tell me about Clean Out Your Inbox week. I'm pleased to say that my inbox currently contains just 9 items and I can confirm that I feel quite good about that. That was only possible by making a conscious decision to make this happen but I'm very glad that I did. Read on to find out the hows and whys.

About four years ago my inbox had something in the region of four thousand emails in it. I rarely needed to delete emails for space and I wanted to have information close to hand in case I needed it.

The trouble is there's something about seeing Inbox Unread 4,567 that saps morale. It doesn't give the impression of being in control of things and it became hard to distinguish what was in the inbox because I needed to do something or just because I thought I might want to refer to it.

Having read about the Getting Things Done (GTD) process of working (but not the book itself) I decided to give clearing the inbox down. GTD basically states that when you're going through your email, anything that will take less than five minutes should be done straight away. Otherwise you should decide whether to defer or delegate it.

To keep the inbox empty I created folders to move emails into when they had been read or acted upon. In fact even this step is now fairly redundant given the good search tools in email software. I still have folders for particular tasks but most of the time email gets put into my Computeractive folder. If I need it then I search for it as I can normally remember the person involved or an effective keyword.

Gmail makes this even simpler as you can archive emails out of the inbox without having to add them to a folder. Folders are also replaced by tags. This helps as an email can be assigned several tags.

One of the common reasons for keeping too many emails in the inbox is that it becomes a to-do list. So the next step for achieving a clear inbox is to make sure that you have a reliable to-do list. If an email needs action at some point, copy it into the to-do list. Outlook makes this quite simple as it is possible to drag an email into the Tasks button. This will copy it into the task. You still need to move the email out of the inbox but it is a powerful tool.

I use a program called TaskCoach for my to-do lists. I keep the list itself in my Dropbox folder so it is always up to date on whatever computer I'm using at the time.

The company that sent out the press release, Mesmo, has some interesting advice about keeping email under control.

Another very useful resource is the D*I*Y Planner Hipster PDA Edition. This collection of index card sized templates is designed for printing as a personal planner and includes a helpful GTD flowchart to help you decide what to do with new emails.

So how are you doing? Let us know how many emails you have in your inbox and we'll maybe follow up with the most interesting comments.