Gmail Inbox Zero

I want to thank my coworker who knows who he is for being the prophet and showing me how easy this was. I am but a mere preacher and convert. Before him, I had heard of Inbox Zero for years and just never thought it was attainable. I'm someone that loves to be organized (who doesn't?) but usually feels it's unattainable. This is something I wrote up for friends and was asked to share here, so I will. It's focused on Gmail (which I use at work and for my personal accounts), so someone will have to tell me if any of this can be applied to Outlook.

I'm going to start by explaining the concept of how it can work, and then go into the largest bulk of the work - labeling and organizing your content - at the bottom. I want to explain what it can do for you before I go into the gory details and scare people off.

Understand this: Gmail is flat. There are no folders, only labels. When you "Archive" an email in Gmail, you are just removing the Inbox label. (It only removes the Inbox label, not any other. Any time you see a reference to "Archive" in Gmail, that is doing exactly and only that: removing the Inbox label.) If you Archive an email, it's still there. It doesn't get auto-deleted later or anything. If you search your emails, it will come up. If you just want to see everything - Archived and non-Archived - simply click "All Mail" in the left navigation pane. Fundamentally, this process is about no longer relying on what is read and unread as the sole source of truth for whether or not you need to care about an email in your Gmail account.

To really make this process sing on any device with a keyboard - laptop or even an iPad - you will want to do these 5 steps just one time that you won't have to repeat.

- Turn on keyboard shortcuts: Gmail -> Settings -> General tab -> Keyboard Shortcuts (Enable) -> Save Changes

- Turn on Advanced Keyboard settings and Auto-Advance: Gmail -> Settings -> Advanced tab -> Auto-advance (Enable) & Custom keyboard shortcuts (Enable) -> Save Changes

- Set Auto-advance to move to the "newer" conversation: Gmail -> Settings -> General tab -> Auto-advance -> Select "Go to the next (newer) conversation" -> Save Changes

- Turn off Inbox categories (not required, but it will happen automatically if you later enable the multi-inbox view): Gmail -> Settings -> Inbox -> Categories, Uncheck all (except Primary, which you cannot uncheck)

- Hide the default labels (also not required, but why *hope* Gmail is going to categorize properly?): Gmail -> Settings -> Labels -> Categories -> Social (hide), Updates (hide), Forums (hide), Promotions (hide)

Now comes the tedious part: label your emails, but not all of them. Which should you label and not label? That's entirely up to you. When I organized my Gmail accounts, it came down to a few questions: What do you care about keeping track of? Are there enough of that type of email to care? Is just leaving it in my account but not in my Inbox enough, or does it NEED a label? Once you start labeling, you will find that some things just make sense. I have so many emails from Coffee Roasters that I didn't want to make each one their own label. Then I realized that I have several roasters I frequent: Slate, AKA, Coma, Cartel, Blip, etc. It made sense to have them separate, so I made sub-labels and filters for my most common roasters, and filtered the rest to the parent folder "Coffee Roasters". For Sam's Club, I just started dumping everything into the "Sam's Club" label, but then realized that having receipts organized would be handy. So I have Sam's Club, and a sub-folder called Receipts. (Pro Tip: you can have two sub-folders with the same name as long as they have a different parent folder. So you can have Receipts under Sam's Club and a different Receipts under Costco.) I also didn't use the same label strategy for any of my Gmail accounts. One is my work account. One is my private personal account that only close friends use (almost no spam). One is my public personal account that gets the most use (all the spam). Others are for threat intel feeds, alerts from my home lab, and other automations. The labels I created for each account were different.

Outside of your automatic labels, you will create a few labels that you'll only use manually. One person suggested Action Items, Awaiting Reply, and Read Through Later. On my work email, I created "#1 Priorities", "#2 Priorities" (things I will get to when the top priorities are handled), and "#3 Waiting". I named them that way so that they would show up at the top of my list. I might add the "Read Later" label as a way to get even better about clearing out my Inbox. I also might switch from have two priorities to having a "Top Priorities" for ongoing issues that will take time to close out, and "Pending Response" for things I haven't yet responded to that will take time. That will keep my Inbox clean more often, but for me, as long as it's clean by the end of the day (and usually several times throughout the day), that's good enough.

I want to be really clear here: except for a very few, very specific cases, you WILL NOT prevent messages from hitting your Inbox. They just won't stay there long. If removing an email from my sight takes just a couple of seconds, why not let it hit my Inbox? No harm in that.

THE GOAL: When you've "finished" with your Inbox for the day, it should be empty (generally, I'm not perfect, but I'm close). When you first look at it again, you should be able to either Archive everything or put it into a "Follow-Up" folder of some kind (the manual folders I listed above, whichever work for you). So I still have a to-do list of emails, but they're not my Inbox. My Inbox is a temporary staging ground.

THE PROCESS: How will this work once you've built labels and cleared your inbox for the first time? When you're at a computer with a keyboard - again, my iPad works just like my laptop for this purpose - you will click on the oldest email in your Inbox; the email all the way at the bottom. You will read it if you care to read it, but there will be some you glance at for just a split second and then archive. For those emails, you click "y" almost immediately to "yank" the Inbox label off of it. That should (again, if you followed directions) then advance to the next-newest email. Maybe you can also "yank" that from your Inbox. Maybe the next email is something I have to respond to. I'll do that if I can respond relatively quickly, and if I then have nothing left to do (unless someone responds with more), I will also yank that out. (As I mentioned above, if responding to that will take too much time, I might have another "Pending" label that I stage those emails in. I haven't done that yet.) Why care about it if I'm not told there is something I HAVE to do about it? Why leave it to clutter my Inbox? If a response is added to it with another question, it will be back in my Inbox, where I'll deal with it then. On the other hand, if I have to ask a question, I might send that to someone and click the "l" key (lower-case L) and then select the "Waiting" label, however you name it. Maybe it's an email thread that I'm going to have to keep coming back to. In that case, I'll pin it in my #1 or #2 Priorities label, accordingly. Again, any replies will kick it back into my Inbox, but I use the Priorities labels as places I will proactively check from time to time when I have time and need to deal with the various tasks I haven't completed yet.

THE WIN, or THE WHY: Why do I love this so much? At the end of the day, or then end of my triaging, I know exactly what I have and have not followed up on. I used to rely on "Read" vs "Unread" as the sole arbiter of which emails mattered. If you do that, you surely are stressed by that like I was. I now know when I'm fully caught up when I travel or have in-person meetings throughout the day. Just because I've opened and skimmed an email on my phone doesn't mean I've REALLY dealt with it, and now I know what is and is not needing follow-up. (Another bonus: I can now confidently Snooze emails in Gmail. Before, I would wonder what I'd do with an email if it just appeared in my cluttered Inbox a day or 10 later. Now, I know I'll deal with it on that future day and/or time, and I will SEE it when it comes back. I never used Snooze before, and I've used it almost every day since implementing this.)

FINAL STEP: Once you've created a good amount of labels, check the box on the top-left of your email list in your Inbox. When you do this, you will see a bar appear at the top of your emails that says, "All 50 conversations on this page are selected. Select all xx,xxx conversations in Inbox". Click the "Select all xx,xxx conversations" hyperlink. Then hit the "y" key to "yank" the Inbox label off of your emails.

AND SO IT BEGINS. You now have a zero inbox. Keep up with it. But also, don't stress. If you have to go a few hours (or days, when you take vacation) without dealing with it, that's fine. You will know what you have and have not read very clearly. If you find you're archiving emails from the same sender every day that you didn't label, you'll probably create a label for those emails in time. Labeling does not have to be perfect EVER because you can always search your emails if you need to find one.

LABELING: Creating labels and filters will probably be tedious at first, but it becomes SUPER, SUPER easy. I just threw all of my lawncare receipts into a new label I created today and it took 20 seconds, literally, to file every email I've ever received from our lawn service into a new label AND create a rule to put them there. If I ever determine I want to change that label or just don't need them labeled, I can just delete the label or rename it.

Start by... looking at your first email! Whatever your most recent email is that you think you'd want to label. Maybe it's from an important person. Maybe it's from a client. Maybe it's from a business you transact with frequently. Let's assume that the email comes from [email protected]. If you just want to put all emails from that business into a label, follow these steps:

1) Type "from:@companya.com " (without quotes) into the Gmail search bar and hit Enter.

2) Assuming those results look right, click the button on the far right of the search bar that looks like volume sliders (no idea why they look like that). If you mouse over that, it should say "Show search options". If you couldn't come up with a good search criteria in Step 1, look at your options here to improve that search, and then hit Search again.

3) Once you feel like the search criteria includes the right emails (you can fix it later, don't stress), then click the "Create Filter" button just to the left of the Search button.

4) Here, you will check two boxes. The first is, obviously, "Apply the label:" and then you will choose an existing label or create a new one. You can create a new label and nest it under an existing label. If you want, you can even create a label named "Company A", and then immediately open the drop-down again, click "Create New", and then create "Receipts" and nest it under the "Company A" label that you just created.

5) Then you will check the last checkbox called "Also apply filter to *x* matching conversations". This will apply this label to emails already in your account. Remember, since search criteria apply to ALL emails and not just those in your Inbox, it will even apply that to emails you have "archived". (Note: this step sometimes takes just seconds, but sometimes takes minutes to process. If like me you are impatient, you can avoid that wait by not checking the box, creating the filter, and then using the same "select all" trick you used to clear out your entire Inbox to select all of your search results, and then drag them onto the label in the left navigation pane. That will always apply your labels in an instant; no waiting for minutes.)

6) Finally, click "Create Filter".

Now, just keep doing that. What if you later find that you get invoices from "Company A" above from?Intuit.com . I suggest creating a search like "from:(@intuit.com ) subject:(Company A)". (You don't need to know the search syntax; you can use the "Show search options" to create them any time. But you'll probably get used to them like I did and start using them.) You can then alter your first filter (Settings -> Filters and Blocked Addresses tab -> find the filter you want to edit -> click Edit on the far right) and you'll basically rebuild your filter the same way.

An issue I ran into was with the account I use for all of my Amazon things. I started with an Amazon label, and later realized that I prefer to have AWS emails separate from Amazon Marketplace emails separate from Shipping emails separate from Order Confirmations, etc. So I found out what the emails look like for each of those and created sub-folders and filters accordingly.

Another issue I ran into was I noticed that one company sent me emails from [email protected], but they used to send them from [email protected]. So what if I create a filter for [email protected] and then realize I'm getting emails that aren't being filtered later? I could edit my existing filter, or just create a new one for the new email address and have them both target the same label. Either is completely fine.

In one case, I wanted to send any email from a group of about 15 people into a label. So I created a rule for "from:([email protected] AND [email protected] AND [email protected])". I think I put maybe 8 email addresses into one filter, and then created a second filter with the remaining addresses.

Another time I noticed that the email address changed a lot, but the label was always "Website X". so rather than do "from:@<something>," I just used "from:(Website X)". Then, Gmail will look for the alias of the sender rather than their actual email address.

I'm just throwing out tips here, but you will figure all of this out on your own, and you will certainly encounter your own challenges. Just start doing it, A little trial and error won't hurt you.

Last tip: use colors for at least the "manual" labels. I found it really handy to see at a glance if an email in my Inbox was from a thread I had labeled as "Waiting", "#1 Priority", or "#2 Priority". Because those labels - unlike all others - need to be manually removed when appropriate. I will never remove the Coffee Roaster label from an email. No need. But when I'm not waiting any more, I have to remove the "Waiting" label from a thread. So I colored just those three labels to help me remove clutter from those manual labels.

Video guide: I mentioned before that I was shown this method in person by a co-worker, but after proselytizing to another co-worker, they sent me this YouTube video which outlines a lot of the same concepts I covered here. He glosses over things I dive deeply into, but also covers advanced techniques that I've adopted (+waiting is the greatest improvement to this that I'll probably ever make).

Just one caveat: he uses "e" to archive. I prefer using "y". "y" removes the current label from this email. So, when you're in the Inbox, it removes your Inbox label exactly the same as hitting "e" would. However, if you're in your "Waiting" label and you're done waiting (i.e. you got a response), clicking "y" will "yank" the "Waiting" label off of it. So "y" is more universal.

Caveat to the caveat: once you've moved to the Multi-Inbox view, if you click on an email that IS NOT in your Inbox but was displayed in your Multi-Inbox view, then clicking "y" won't remove the corresponding label because from Gmail's standpoint, you're still in the Inbox. So if you click on the "Waiting" label on the left-hand navigation pane, open an email, and click "y", it will remove the Waiting label. If you got to that same email by clicking on it from within your multi-inbox, clicking "y" will do nothing since you're still "in your Inbox" (if you try this, you'll see "Inbox" is still highlighted on the left) and that email isn't in your Inbox (if you're following directions).