Loads of promotional, spam, order confirmations, recruiter emails, notifications, receipts and irrelevant/useless emails kept over that past 9-10 years. Could be worse though, I’ve seen somebody who had 13000+ unread messages, this is not including their read messages.
I’ve stumbled across a blog I read online (though I didn’t think to save the link) which talked about “Inbox Zero”. The idea was to set up a email management system in order to boost productivity. Start by setting up some labels for common emails you normally get such as ‘Receipts’, ‘Business’ and ‘Personal’. When you receive these particular emails, when you’ve read them and actioned any task associated with them, attach the relevant label and then archive it. Archiving emails just removes it from your ‘inbox’ but will still be available and searchable either within the label category or via the search feature of your email client. Any other emails, you delete as they’re end up cluttering your email inbox.
If done correctly, you should always have 0 read or unread emails in your inbox, any new emails will be immediately visible and in bold (as they’re unread). Once you’ve read and actioned them, they will either be labelled then archived or immediately deleted.
I also believe it was designed to allow you to treat your emails as some sort of to-do list where by each email needs to be actioned in one form or another. For example, if it were a car insurance renewal reminder email, it would mean its time to consider new quotes for car insurance or simply allow the renewal to go ahead. I need to action this before archiving or deleting the email, so if this email is still visible in my inbox, it implicitly says that this task has not been addressed or completed yet.
For me to implement this strategy, the first step I needed to do was to completely clear down my own inbox. Gmail already provided a tab system where they automatically filter your emails by tabs I.e. Social, Promotions, Updates etc. I know that I don’t need any ‘Social’ or ‘Promotions’ related emails, so I deleted all of them first. That alone deleted thousands of unwanted and unnecessary emails. I then looked to see any common ‘senders’ such as emails from ‘indeed’ or ‘amazon’ which were not ones that I cared about such as order dispatched or recommendations (which we not in the filtered ‘Promotions’ tab) and deleted those in bulk as well.
I didn’t do this in one evening, deleting all of these emails were done incrementally over the span of a week or so before I managed to whittle it down to fewer than 1000. By this point, I had to go through these emails and decide whether I wanted to keep and archive them or delete them. Some emails were a pain because I sent them to myself, often documents or zip files that I needed to move across computers, and I didn’t think to give them any context and left the subject blank. A silly habit which now meant I had to download the files and check they were still things I needed. Often they were not, so I deleted most of them.
It’s taken a while but I’ve eventually managed to reduce my inbox to 0 emails. Each time I check my inbox, there will usually be fewer than 10 available to read and to either be archived or deleted thus keeping the inbox count to 0. I think there were more to this in the email management system, such as delegating tasks or defer them, I probably won’t be utilising all of these other techniques on top of all of this, the reduced inbox count is fine for now.
Having experienced “Inbox Zero”, I highly recommend it, the organised nature of it all really keeps everything clean and in order. It makes me confident that everything I have archived is somewhat important or worth keeping, it keeps the memory usage way down, and treating the emails as a sort of to-do list is also a bonus. Definitely worth it.