The zero-inbox philosophy

Emails today is corrupted. I, as a college student, get at least 10 emails a day, which is not too many, but it is definitely not satisfactory. It floods my inbox and I can lose track of emails I actually have to keep in mind. The zero-inbox philosophy is a practice I started about a year and a half ago in high school, which prevents all of that. I will share how I use this method everyday to never lose the emails that I actually need.

What is the zero-inbox philosophy?

This philosophy is a very simple way to organize emails. The aim of this practice is to make the inbox to basically be a to-do list, and all completed to-do to be in the archive.

How do I practice it?

First, I think of each email as a task to complete. If it’s a task completed, I move it to the archive folder. The inbox only consists of emails that I still need to take some action for; such as replying. The reason I archive, instead of just trash or delete, is because there are occasions when I want to look back at emails. If I archive my email, I know that it will be persisted, but will not be in the inbox. There are occasions when I know for sure I would never look at an email in the future, but I still put them in archive just in case.

Notes

There are a few more things I do to make my email experience better.

• Set up auto-filtering methods or unsubscribe to all newsletters
• I have shortcuts for sending myself an email, so that I can create a to-do task in my inbox. I also set up auto-tagging emails from my own email address, so I can find them easier later
• Move spams to spam folder, instead of just deleting them right away, so that the email address will be marked spam for future

Conclusion

To see an empty inbox is such a relief, since that means I have nothing to do. The zero-inbox philosophy is how I can keep track of my emails and omit redundant to-do creation. The ideal is lack of newsletters and spams, but that would not happen any time soon. I hope this helps you in some form to organize your emails.