Inbox Zero: Slash and Burn at 43 Folders
Merlin Mann is running a series on emptying your inbox (easy) and keeping it that way (harder).
His articles — “Inbox Zero” he’s calling them — cover all sorts of tips and tricks 
from just nuking your inbox to the smart use of filters and the liberating joy of hammering the delete button. He also talks about the importance of scheduling visits to your inbox so that you stay in control of your inbox and not vice-versa.
Speaking of Yojimbo, he also presents a series of past posts entitled, “Becoming an Email Ninja” .
As I read it, the overall message is, “For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.â€
It is interesting to compare this advice with the strategies of other people — like Keith Robinson’s suggestions on Lifehacker (Getting to Done ) and Guy Kawasaki’s tips (12 Tips for Better Emailing ).
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Tags: 43 Folders, email, hacks, Inbox, merlin mann, Productivity, tell your inbox who's boss
March 17th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
I have never gotten why this was so hard for some people to do. I’ve had an empty inbox almost by instinct since my first emails in Eudora under System 7.5–in Eudora, in Netscape, in Pine at college, and now in Mail, I use a combination of rules and manual filing to keep my inbox completely clean. (In fact, my current set of rules was created by some careful grep work on my .procmailrc from the Pine days, as I’m still subscribed to most of the mailing lists I was on then.) Basically, I file all my list mail into list-specific folders, I mark spam with POPFile and file that for a quick scan-and-delete, and anything else shows up in the inbox, where it remains until dealt with. This comes to about five messages a day, and is always very easy to handle. I’m sure Merlin’s tips will help some people, but I don’t think I need them. :-)
April 18th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
I have more than 5 emails a day to contend with. I find that filtering by size along with addressbook filters is the most helpful to keep things manageable. I’m frustrated using Mail (1.3.11) on my G4 OSX 10.3.9. Does Mail 2.0 provide the ability to create rules by message size?
April 18th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Anne: I don’t think a rule can be constructed on email size. I would be happy to be proven wrong though.
September 4th, 2006 at 10:27 pm
[...] Some of them will be familiar to Hawk Wings readers like how the delete key is your best friend and reducing the frequency of your email checks. [...]