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Zero Inbox, Gmail

Someone tried to tell me over a year ago that I needed to have an empty inbox, and it's taken me until now to hear him.

Yes I realize that I'm -very- late to the party here, but I thought I'd record how I did this in an effort to allow any gmail user that finds this page to save an hour as they embark on the path to righteous disciplined daily activity, and finally put e-mail in its rightful place.

I've been inspired by Merlin Mann's google talk on having nothing in your inbox. I learned a lot about myself while watching it and this hour I'm on a self improvement kick. Most of you won't notice the difference. ;-)

Once you'd been convinced that you need to zero your inbox, Mann suggests doing it now, so you can "stop sucking". You get to put your current inbox into a single folder ('label' in gmail speak). It feels great. It has the advantage of not needing to declare e-mail bankruptcy and you get to put off the task of going through all your current (sullied) inbox.

Steps:

1) Label all your inbox as DMZ. This gives you a way to view your as-yet-un-DMZed emails as a group. Do this in gmail by:

  • create a label called DMZ
  • go to "Show search options"
  • select searching only within the Inbox
  • click 'Search Email'
  • click 'Select All'

Gmail will respond by telling you that it's selected 20 e-mails. If you're anything like me you've got more than 20 in the inbox. (ahem, 5555 conversations?!) In order to select all those emails, it'll also present you with a link right in the statement about having selected 20 that you can select them all. Do it.

  • check under "More actions..." for the action to label these as DMZ

2) Archive your DMZ posts, using a similar click path as above.

3) Schedule some time each day to go through your DMZ e-mails, and throw them through your new list of actions to take with e-mails.

  • Delete (or Archive)
  • Delegate
  • Respond
  • Defer
  • Do

Gmail's 'archive' buttons distributed liberally around the app are the way to do the first option listed above, and I look forward to clicking Archive early and often. I'm also excited at the prospect of being able to invert my inbox view and have it be in chronological order, rather than most recent at the top and trailing off toward barely memorable history.

Great... and like so many days gone by, today is a new day.