Mission Inbox Zero, and how Google Inbox got me there

Inbox Zero has been the holy grail for email users, more so for technology professionals. Email services have been getting better at cutting clutter over time, starting with showing you the right emails (minus spam), then relevant ones (minus newsletters/updates) and most recently important ones (minus low-priority). These continuous advances notwithstanding, maintaining an uncluttered inbox, leave alone inbox zero, has been a rarity.

I've been following a simple email workflow, that has been reasonably effective to get things done at work. Starting with priority emails, I read and action them, which then becomes 'read'. If I need more time to read or action it later, I keep it 'unread'.  Likewise, if I'm awaiting response or action from others to close loop on an email, I keep those 'unread' too. Several times in a day, I scan the low-priority emails or notifications and keep clearing it. Though this approach has been working for me, it means a *lot* of unread emails and a daily struggle to avoid wasting time on re-scanning known pending actions or not-yet-mature threads.

I have tried some popular email productivity apps such as boxni, gmailmeter, sanebox, followupthen all promising you with tickets to the holy land of 'inbox zero'. However, I found them to be incremental improvements which only take you ahead a couple of steps. Having heard rave reviews about Inbox by Gmail for the past 6 months, I took a look, but was surprised to find it designed against 'time-ingrained, conventional approaches'. Though I didn't drop it completely, I kept avoiding it, until last week when Anand made a gentle but firm push in this direction.

Giving it some serious thought, I've been exploring & trying out this alternative and surprisingly, this seems to solve many of the clutter problems. 

• Inbox doesn't make a major distinction of 'read' vs 'unread' (my fundamental grouse for avoiding it)
• Instead you mark actioned emails as 'done' which get archived (another reason for panic, since I've never archived a single email earlier)
• Any email that you need to read or act later, can be 'snoozed' until then. Similarly, actions pending from others could also be 'snoozed' until you reach a future time or place
• Labels have gotten smarter with 'bundles' where auto-categorised emails are bundled for quicker and bulk action
• Add to that, gamification and smart gestures to swipe and mark 'done', 'snooze' or 'set reminders'.

Inbox, thus forces you to transform your mailbox into a to-do list rather than a carefully curated journal. The past week, I've been on a cleanup mission to do something about the 1000 odd unread emails (300+ high priority!) in my mailbox. Before migrating to Inbox, I had to do a 'purge act' and bring it down to a manageable list to start with. Firstly I archived all my 'read' emails. Considering I had over 20,000 emails in 'actioned' state over the past 5 years, I archived them in bulk, though it took a couple of attempts to get it done.  

I've then been cutting, slashing and burning to bring down the 'unread' count over the past few days. The first 500 was a breeze with easy-to-discard calendar notifications, updates and emails that I shouldn't have really been in. The next 300 started getting slow, with FYI emails and interesting reads, some really dated. The final 200 were the ones that needed real action and hence took a bulk of time. I'm sure quite a few brows would have been raised to hear back from me on long forgotten threads, after months or even years, in a couple of cases. Reaching sub-100 emails, I switched over to Inbox and happily snoozed the future actions and follow-up emails. I quickly setup bundles to improve categorization and added some helpful reminders.

Seeing an inbox with under 30 emails was extremely cathartic, something I haven't achieved in years! Migration to Inbox acted as a good push to get to this state, however staying here needs much more than its cool features. After all, Inbox zero is not exactly about having zero emails, but an ongoing sensible philosophy of email management, to ensure that emails which are just a means to get work done don't eat up too much of your time. Instead, you must be able to reserve a bulk of your time & attention for getting creative and productive work done.