Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox

A noteworthy addition to the filtering of email. Gmail has a finite allowed number of filters. It can be advantageous (it is to me) to make e.g. a "newsletter" filter, as Gmail allows operators such as "OR" when creating filters.

So what I would suggest is make a filter called "newsletters" and when you receive newsletters that are not in the filter, simply add them to that filter. What I have done is created one where the "skip inbox" is checked off and the "From" field looks like this "newsletter@whatever.com OR newsletters@skipit.com OR ..." and I add an "OR new@newsletter.com" when one in not in the filter. Then also apply a label (e.g. "newsletter") and you're good to go. Within a month you will be unproductive free.

I have also other labels and corresponding filters, such as "community", "friends & family" (where skip inbox is not checked), "software updates" etc.. Choose what filters and labels make sense to you based on the how you read your email. (e.g. if it is more important to read your community emails than your newsletters, it would be logical to separate them with different labels/filters).

I didn't know you could use OR in in your filters.. great tip Random_guy! Thanks!

I too hate having stuff in my inbox, but, since i'm a forgetful person, these things just don't work for me. I have this habbit of, if i can see some clutter, i try to get rid of it, so i found that, unless i need to do something with it, it gets archived, so the only things in my inbox are things that are relavant right now, or i need to remember to do something with sometime. If i can't see it though, i will forget it. Same goes with my desktop, the only thing on it is an icon to the hard drive. Things get added, like work, if i need to finish it, and since i hate clutter on my desktop, it forces me to do something with it, clean it up.

"and that annoying inbox chime that dings"

This can be turned off by unchecking the 'Play a sound when a new message arrives' option. It's been that way for years now.

I haven't found that Gmail is any better or worse than Outlook.

1. What on earth were you doing in your wife's gmail?
2. Somebody ought to come up with similar rules for RSS. I've come to realise that browsing RSS does alot more to tax your productivity than it does to add to it. What's worse, most of us dont recieve rss content from our bosses or long lost friends, which is the case with email, so as productivity goes, the buck stops with you reading it.

Thanks for sharing those useful tips. I should move from Yahoo to GMail now.

[quote]I haven't found that Gmail is any better or worse than Outlook.[/quote]

No, Outlook is great. However, not portable, unless you bring your computer with you or have access to an exchange server with webaccess. Gmail has that, and a lot more storage, and can be used with basically ANY webbrowser there is.
But most importantly, Gmail and Outlook can work in harmony through POP3, and you can have the best of both worlds. Even in case of a complete HD failure, you can recover all mails in your Outlook as they are stored in your gmail account and can be imported again and again.

[...]Five simple rules for keeping an empty inbox[...]

Thanks for this, I just started using Gmail fulltime after an outage on my home server, now all mail gets bounced to Gmail to see how I like it. The lack of 'folders' killed me, and not being able to clear out my INBOX (something that I think far too many people do) was really hindering my love of it; but I now see how 'filters' and archive are basically the same thing! Another thing a friend of mine did at work, under his INBOX he'd have a dir called fileit where he'd drop requests/projects that he's been pinged about, and replied to, but was waiting on a reply from the originator. This way if it sunk to the bottom of his fileit folder due to no communication, no bother cause he'd keep his INBOX clean.

This post helped me a ton already, thanks!

Nice generic explanation of the GTD inbox rules, totally valuable.

I have some GTD related stuff going on over here,
http://bigmojo.net/monsters/?cat=3

Enjoy

Great tips. Regarding not checking email more than once an hour, I can recommend LiSA, which speaks with a human voice when you have mail, even saying who from: "You have a message from a client" or "You have a reply from your boss". http:///www.speakingassistant.com

LiSA works for Mac, Window and Linux and is one of the products supporting our Hyperwords project. Hope you like her! :-)

These are some great hints at keeping clean. The one that most people will have a problem with is the closing of your email and not checking it for a few hours.

I have two sets of accounts. My direct work using Outlook and then personal email using Opera. Opera has been using filters for much longer than Gmail so their filtering system is as good if not better (only said because they have been doing it longer, I do not have a gmail account.) The filtering method works very good versus the folder method in Outlook. It does come down to the same mechanics and what you get used to.

I handle 50 emails of business each day and about 500 spam a day and both styles (folders/filters) handle those level with ease. I change my rules everyday to accomodate new items.

Again, great list.

The number one time saving tip - for email inboxes and beyond: Learn keystroke/keyboard shortcuts! This might be obvious, but it bears repeating when discussing efficiency. After years and years of Eudora usage with dozens of filters, I finally forced myself to use the mouse less and keyboard shortcuts more. The results were amazing. I can process 300-400 incoming messages almost instantly, where my mouse driven activities had me spending 10-20 minutes every morning. Not exactly applicable to web based email, but on the desktop, shortcuts rule.

I am relatively new to GTD and this post is a real "keeper". Thank you!! I also have been listening to some podcasts featuring David Allen. I mention them here:

http://successbooks.blogspot.com/2006/11/podcast-review-interviews-with-davd.html

I use my everyday GMAIL account for storage. Maybe I should be pushing "valuable files" in another gmail account so i can keep my normal email acct empty?

You should check out Bubbles, it has a nice Systray Icon for Gmail that will notify you if you have new messages. But also if you click on it opens your Gmail inbox. It is basically a web browser sitting in your Systray.
http://www.3d3r.com/bubbles/

An issue in itself is the volume of received e-mails (and I assume we are not talking spam here), and that's where I think you lack one very important advice: Simply stop the flood of messages, e.g.:
- don't sign up to any mailing lists, even if they are professional. Discussions are held in forums and via chat and phone calls, not via e-mail. Especially if you receive e-mails from discussions you just follow, there's every reason to cancel, as most mailing lists have archives.
- Switch to a phone call or text chat if there's need for a quick response or if there's risk for misunderstandings. In that case don't respond via e-mail except to summarize decisions.

There are two tips I have to add to this, firstly remember you can filter on gmail email labels, so for example sign up to most newsletters with something like bob+newsletter@gmail.com and it will be delivered as normal to bob@gmail.com but you can set up a filter in the to box to intercept the email and label it.

The other advice is to use an external mail service such as spamgourmet where you can set up fake emails to forward email to your real email, helps filter out spam.

I take this label thing one step further, because I own my domain, I have set up gmail for my domain, meaning I have differn't emails going to differn't labels, such as newsletters@domain.com and I can have unlimited amounts of these emails, all being forwarded to my use all gmail account.

I have a different style that works for me with Thunderbird and Comcast mail.

1) All incoming messages get downloaded but remain on the Comcast server for later portability unless I remove them from my inbox.

2) Junk mail gets filtered to the Thunderbird junk folder. I check later, retrieve anything wrongly labeled junk, delete the rest.

3) Messages of known topic or list go filtered, unread to folders set up for those topics or lists. I check periodically.

4) Anything unread in the inbox is then worth dealing with. I read it and deal with it. If I can't deal with it right then, I mark it unread and come back to it later.

5) Everything already read and dealt with remains in the inbox for later easy search.

6) I bcc myself to my inbox on every outgoing message. This helps later searches on a given subject line.

7) Eventually my Comcast server limit will be reached and I will archive half of the inbox to a local "Old mail" folder.

Like I say, it works for me, and doesn't feel cluttered. YMMV

Or you could just use GMail Notifier.
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/notifier/index.html