Zero inbox rule

We have many distractions in daily life and a lot of them are digital distractions apps dings on the mobile phone, beeps on laptop, beeps on home appliances and so on. They also follow into your work if you are using these equipments at work, if you are a knowledge worker, they become detrimental to your productivity. Some micro-tweaks can help to live among the barrage of distractions.

Email is still one of the most important tool that is in use for work. We subscribe to various mailing lists, groups for information and participation. Tasks and updates are asynchronously shared over email. Overtime we get overwhelmed by the inbox. We try to arrange it into folders and apply sophisticated rules to move emails around into offline folders, it works as expected. With time the offline folders start growing in unread email count overtime.

I follow two rules

1. Everyday Zero out the inbox, that means every email is processed, some are deleted without reading
2. Shutdown the email client. Bring it up and process the emails in 2 or 3 batches during the day.

At the end of the day there are no unread messages left in inbox. This gives an immense sense of "done" that you can work on what needs to be done that you read in those emails