How to organize your email inbox (it's not inbox zero)

Keeping your email inbox is a tall task. Some prefer to go the route of inbox zero, but we've adapted an approach that aligns a bit more with the GTD style of David Allen.

Labels for the win

When organizing our inboxes, we've decided to use a label approach through Gmail (they essentially act as folders in your Gmail account).

For our purposes, our labels consist of the following:

• 1 - Action Pending
• 2 - Waiting
• 3 - Future
• 4 - Cabinet
• 5 - One Day Maybe
• 6+ - Any other random organization you may prefer

Action Pending

Action pending are emails that need to be dealt with or processed. For example, it could be an email from a co-worker that requires a response or something you need to look into once you have more time. Place these into your action pending; consider it a to-do item.

Waiting

What happens to the emails waiting for someone else to respond to or those that can't be dealt with until something else happens?

"Waiting" is where you put those emails. It's generally an Action Pending email on which you have taken some action but is waiting for something else to happen before you can proceed.

Future

This one is optional, but it's one we like to have for things that have a definite date in the future. For example, do you have emails that are tickets to a concert or a dinner reservation that's coming up next week? "Future" is the perfect place to put those emails. It means you don't have to worry about it, but it's quickly accessible when you need to show your tickets to the concert in two weeks.

Cabinet

So what do we do when an email is done or completely processed; add the "Cabinet" label. A place that is mostly just a reference label. So you completed that action pending item, then put it in your cabinet. Did you attend that concert? Add the "Cabinet" label. It's storage for anything you've taken action on. Now you could leave it in your inbox and remove any other labels which would serve the same purpose. But it will be with all the other spam emails you don't need to handle.

One Day Maybe

You could call this "someday" or "maybe," but this is the label used for things you may be interested in at some point. For example, it's an idea for your business that you may like to implement, but it's not quite time yet. It may be a project you think would make sense for your house, but it's not definite yet. That's when you use this label.

Processing your inbox with labels

The best part about just using labels is that it's much quicker to filter through your inbox and only deal with the emails that require some action. The rest can stay in your inbox, and you never really have to manage them.

For every 100 emails we receive, we may only have to deal with 5-10.

It's much easier to label those 5-10 emails than to go through each email, deleting the ones that are just spam.

If we need to take action on something, we label it "action pending." We add the future label if an email has a good idea we may want to implement down the road.

When we're ready to work on emails requiring action, we click on our appropriate labels and only see a handful of emails.

It's a reduction in the mental load when working with emails. Once we've dealt with an email, we adjust the label accordingly and continue our day.

Check your email 1-2x/day (personal email)

We like to check our emails around 11 am and one more time around 5 pm. Only checking 1-2x per day allows us to see any time-sensitive emails after we've been productive in the morning, then again towards the end of the day when people may be sending emails at the end of their day. We can then keep on top of things without spending too much time in our inboxes.

Check your email 2x+ (work email)

Depending on what you do for work, you may need to check your email several times a day.

There's nothing wrong with that, just don't check it 50 times a day, as it's a waste of time. Most jobs don't expect you to respond within five minutes of someone emailing you. But if they do, switch jobs (only kidding).

If you do need to check it more frequently, that's ok. Now you just put any actionable emails into your action pending folder and deal with them as necessary.

Other options - Inbox Zero

Inbox zero is the idea that you want to get your email inbox down to zero daily, meaning no emails are sitting in your inbox.

While it seemed to be the way to do things years ago, it no longer appears to be the case.

It takes up too much time.

The reality of keeping your inbox at zero is that it takes up much more time than is necessary to organize what's in it.

What happens when you skip a day, a few days, or a week? The inbox gets out of control and takes forever to clear out again.

We used to keep our inbox at zero for a couple of years until we realized that email search and filtering are excellent at this current time.

Search is excellent these days.

The reality is that most email services are excellent at searching for emails you need to find.

Gmail has many ways to filter emails out by person, subject, body copy, dates, etc. And so do the rest of the email clients.

Take a look at the search operators you can use with Gmail. Of course, Outlook also has many ways to search through emails.

They realize it's more efficient to properly search through emails than to move/organize every single email.