{"id":999,"date":"2008-02-25T21:04:39","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T21:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/02\/regaining-control-of-e-mail-with-inbox-zero.htm"},"modified":"2008-02-27T10:10:10","modified_gmt":"2008-02-27T10:10:10","slug":"regaining-control-of-e-mail-with-inbox-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/02\/regaining-control-of-e-mail-with-inbox-zero.htm","title":{"rendered":"Regaining control of e-mail with Inbox Zero"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my day job (the one that pays the bills… not this website), my boss is a guy called Garry Martin. At the risk of sounding sycophantic, I can learn a lot from Garry – not only because he somehow manages to walk the fine line between technical knowledge and effective management, but because he seems to do it with effortless efficiency. Modestly, he tells me that its all a fa\u00c3\u00a7ade and that I should see his office at home but there is a saying that perception is reality – and my perception is that he is highly productive – so I’m trying to learn some of the life hacking techniques that he uses.<\/p>\n

The first on his list of techniques is Getting Things Done (GTD). I haven’t read David Allen’s book on GTD<\/a> and my attempt to listen to the audio version on a transatlantic flight last November resulted in my falling asleep – so that didn’t get much done. Even so, I do listen to a lot of podcasts featuring Merlin Mann, who is something of a GTD evangelist, and have been meaning for some time now to watch the Google Tech Talk video on the method of e-mail management that Merlin refers to as Inbox Zero<\/a>. It’s no co-incidence that Garry uses this method, and after he helped me to convert to the system last week, I’m hooked.<\/p>\n

You see, I have long since been a slave to my e-mail – and as for RSS feeds, I rarely find the time to look at them (ironic for a prolific blogger). I also find instant messaging and SMS very inefficient methods of communication. So, I decided to start 2008 with a new system for managing mail – less frequent e-mail checks, fewer hierarchical folders, and more efficiency. It didn’t work. I still found that every month I needed a day to sort out e-mail. That is not the idea of productivity that I had in mind. I had the right ideas but was failing to process to zero.<\/p>\n

Enter Inbox Zero<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“One of the most important soft skills you can have is figuring out how to deal with a high volume of e-mail.”<\/p>\n

[Merlin Mann]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inbox Zero is based on GTD – also known as advanced common sense. That is to say that the principles are obvious, but that we don’t always do obvious things. In his Google Tech Talk, Mann outlined four principles for e-mail management:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. E-mail is just a medium.<\/li>\n
  2. There is one place for anything (no need for hierarchy).<\/li>\n
  3. Process to zero (every time that you check e-mail – just checking is not enough).<\/li>\n
  4. Convert to actions (even if that action is just to delete the message).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    “One of the most important soft skills you can have is figuring out how to deal with a high volume of e-mail”<\/p>\n

    Mann suggest that just 5 verbs are enough to process all e-mail (delete, delegate, respond, defer and do) – I’m using a slightly different set of folders but the principle is the same – sorting messages (both Inbox and Sent Items) into a limited number of categories:<\/p>\n