Reproduced here from LinkedIn

Help! I’m Sinking! Three Tips for an Empty Inbox

Kenneth Myers
May 4, 2017
5 min read

Email is one of those ubiquitous mediums that may never go away. I even know a few people who always tell me not to email them because they have given up on using email. I thought I would share my method to keeping a clean inbox and get some tips from those who find it useful. The intent of my system is to only have the most important emails in my inbox and to have reviewed everything by the end of the week. To level set, I receive 100 - 150 emails a day. Add time to my suggestions based on your own multiples of this level of traffic

I have three folders:

• Inbox
• Newsletters
• Not to me

I have three filters:

1. Newsletters, digests, or other information or promotional material. I have a basic filter based on keywords. 95% of the emails that contain these types of keywords are from listservs or other mass mailers. I play with it as some emails may slip through from time to time. Right now my keywords are: “Unsubscribe”, “Receive future emails”, “Click here”, “Notification preferences”, and “Manager your email preferences”. I usually don’t care if I miss reading these messages. It also makes life easier when I go on vacation. I can scan the subjects or delete all the messages when I return.

2. Emails where my name is not in the “To” field. If the email is not “TO” me then it is either for information or not important right? 95% of the time this is true so play with it as needed. I’ve evolved to this point over the last three years and found it has been successful.

3. To mitigate the risk of having an important email where I’m CC’d, I setup a filter for specific people to go to my inbox. These are people who are either important to me at home, work or life. This filter contains my family, managers, and random people. Whoever is important in your life and you don’t want to miss their messages.

My processing schedule:

1. Morning: I scan my inbox for important subjects and people. If I don’t see anything, STOP, move on to my frog breakfast. If I do, see GTD method below. I spend less than 15 minutes doing this scan so it doesn’t zap my morning coffee/running rush. The morning is for your most important tasks when you have the most energy and focus. Mark Twain said if you eat a frog for breakfast every morning the worst part of the day is behind you. Do you eat frogs for breakfast?? I do.

2. During the day: I check my inbox once before lunch and once after lunch. Again, no more than 15 minutes if needed.

3. Afternoon: This is the inbox focus time. 20 - 30 minutes before I leave for the day. I close my door and put my phone on airplane mode to help me focus. I process every email in my inbox using a GTD (Getting Things Done) method.

1) Is it actionable? Yes!

• Takes less than two minutes? DO IT!
• More than two minutes?
• Delegate and track its progress or defer and plan an event to take action

2) Not actionable?

• Store it in your reference place (evernote, one note, PST, etc);
• Save as a someday item with a date trigger to develop it more; or
• TRASH!

I clean my “Newsletter” and “Not to Me” folder twice a week (usually Tuesday and Thursday) and plan 1 -2 hours if needed. This is flexible based on my needs for the week. I receive some newsletters or digests that are long and I have to/want to read to learn something.

The most important part of the schedule is that my inbox is COMPLETELY clean when I leave for the day and by the end of the week I’ve gone through everything. A system only works as well as it works for you and your needs. This works for me, but may not work for you. Try it out and let me know what you think. Have a suggestion to improve it? Leave a comment!

I love being productive and trying out different productivity methods (Pomodoro, GTD, Secret Weapon, etc) and tools (todoist, evernote, onenote, omnifocus, etc). Todoist and Evernote are my go to tools right now, but my needs are constantly evolving. Leave a comment if you curious how I track other things.