Bruno Miranda's Notebook

I am about to state the obvious. Perhaps the simplest concepts you have ever heard. If Inbox 0 sounds more like a legend than reality, you are doing it wrong. I used to be drowned in email myself, at one point it looked like the reason for my existence was to answer emails.

Here are a couple of concepts to get you out of your misery and make you a more productive person. In other words, have a life outside of your inbox. GTD is greatly overrated so I won’t be talking about that here. Some of these may not apply to you, most will.

Please note, if your inbox has over 500 unread messages at the moment, you will need to declare email bankruptcy (delete all message) and start from scratch. Don’t worry, the important ones will make their way back into the inbox shortly.

Let’s start with the basics:

Stop Sending Email

As crazy as this may sound, the more email you send the more replies you get. Also stop sending “Reply-all” messages. It is very unlikely that all those people need to see your message or your reply. Only include the absolute most necessary recipients.

Unsubscribe from ALL newsletters. Really.

No one needs all that promo stuff. If you need a new cellular phone you will do your own research. If you need a new LCD monitor, you will search for it.

Unsubscribe from Groups

Unsubscribe from 95% of the groups you are currently receiving email notifications from. Groups that you absolutely can’t unsubscribe from, elect to receive the abridged version of the notifications. One per day is usually the case.

Review your Messages for Patterns

Create a folder for receipts, important, clients, travel and action items. Create rules to automatically move mail to those folders. Your folder names may be different from mine, remember you are looking for patterns.

Stop Flagging Email

Flagging is completely useless. You are basically adding yet another reference to something in your memory which leaves an empty node in your brain wasting space, sort of like a rogue process.

Remove the New-mail Sound

Nothing is more disturbing to productivity than that annoying sound mail clients make when you receive a new email. Do you silence your mobile phone when you go inside a church or meeting? Then silence your mail when it is time to work.

Turn off Automatic New Email Check

Imagine if your mailman came by your house every 15 minutes and potentially left new mail for you. You would be much more likely to stop what you are doing and go outside to check for new letters. How many times a day do you check you physical mailbox? Probably once.

Open your Email Reader 1-3 times a Day.

In the beginning this will be difficult. Hide the shortcuts to the application which will make you think about what you are doing every time you hunt to open it. Do this until it becomes second nature.

Make Constant use of Read/Unread Buttons

If you glance at a message and realize you will not be able to action upon it instantly, stop, mark it as unread and move on. One may ask, won’t this create more new email in your inbox? The answer is NO. It gives you the liberty to move on to the next messages, deleting, marking as read or moving them to their final resting places. This will leave behind only the messages you need to act upon at a later time. Move them to a designated folder.

Enable Threads

This compacts a conversation of multiple email messages into a single topic. This gives you the impression you have less pending items. Instead of seeing 10 unread messages under the same topic, you just see that the topic has pending messages to be read. See sample below taken from my receipts folder in Mail.app

Hide Unread Count (if possible)

The new Gmail Labs let’s you do this. No need to see exactly how many unread messages you have in your inbox other than for panic generating purposes. Mail.app unfortunately likes to create panic by showing your unread messages count.

Turn off Notifications

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, whatever it may be, make sure they are only emailing you important messages, and not every time someone browsers your profile.

Delete Button is your Friend

Do not be afraid to delete it, if you think about deleting it, chances are that the best thing to do is delete it.

And lastly rejoice.