I recently got serious about Priority Inbox and it has really turned my GMail experience around. After less than a week of being proactive about tagging important vs. not-important emails GMail was able to pick up the trend and do a perfect job of separation. I now have my phone and computer only notify me of priority inbox and then I clear the regular inbox at the end of the day. Reduced my active email volume by about half.
How To Win At Email
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: How To Win At Email
#32I get maybe four or five e-mails a week and actively look forward to - no, ache for the experience of - reading each of them. I can only imagine what it must be like to live a life where I am so in demand that I literally cannot process my inbox.
Re: How To Win At Email
#33> The great part about this is that when you hit Inbox 0, you are DONE (yes thats amazing right?) with email.
Should perhaps add parentheses with "(but don't forget you're not really done, you've just hidden anything that takes more than two minutes to respond to out of view, make sure you deal with those emails later)".
Re: How To Win At Email
#34Just turn on Gmail's Priority Inbox feature and be done with it.
I tried that but found that this worked much better for me personally. Also I had emails in very different levels of "response required" - email lists (don't need to look at vs response required immediately). Also a big plus of this approach is feeling like you are "done" with email. I know it seems a bit complicated but its actually quite simple - most of the setup is a one time upfront cost of about 20 min. Try it…
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Re: How To Win At Email
#35The only problem I have with this approach (which I've been using for years now) is that I'm too fast. My procrastination takes less than 15 minutes and then I have to go back to working again!
When you've done this sort of thing for email, and it eventually becomes second nature to apply the same level of filtering to Google Reader, then to Twitter lists, then Facebook groups, etc - you end up blocking so much of the noise that it's disheartening when you finally discover that actually the signal isn't very interesting either.
sigh The organised person's first world problems, I guess...
Re: How To Win At Email
#36The best thing I ever did in Gmail was filter the word "unsubscribe" to skip the inbox and go into a "Newsletters" label. Whenever I peek in there I see nothing but garbage, dozens of emails a day that I wouldn't have cared about. Right now it's sitting at 5,162 unread emails. It keeps my inbox almost always being things that are relevant or interesting. I've shared this with a few friends who love it. It's pretty fl…
Why not just unsubscribe from all these useless newsletters?
Re: How To Win At Email
#37The best thing I ever did in Gmail was filter the word "unsubscribe" to skip the inbox and go into a "Newsletters" label. Whenever I peek in there I see nothing but garbage, dozens of emails a day that I wouldn't have cared about. Right now it's sitting at 5,162 unread emails. It keeps my inbox almost always being things that are relevant or interesting. I've shared this with a few friends who love it. It's pretty fl…
Why not just unsubscribe from all these useless newsletters?
Oh man. They come at a dime a dozen. I think my method is much more effective.
Re: How To Win At Email
#38> The great part about this is that when you hit Inbox 0, you are DONE (yes thats amazing right?) with email. Should perhaps add parentheses with "(but don't forget you're not really done, you've just hidden anything that takes more than two minutes to respond to out of view, make sure you deal with those emails later)".
Yes, thank you. You still see them in your inbox view (due to multiple inbox) so you are still aware of them.
Re: How To Win At Email
#39> The great part about this is that when you hit Inbox 0, you are DONE (yes thats amazing right?) with email. Should perhaps add parentheses with "(but don't forget you're not really done, you've just hidden anything that takes more than two minutes to respond to out of view, make sure you deal with those emails later)".
I think I'm going to add a picture of multiple inbox to make this clearer.
Re: How To Win At Email
#40> The great part about this is that when you hit Inbox 0, you are DONE (yes thats amazing right?) with email. Should perhaps add parentheses with "(but don't forget you're not really done, you've just hidden anything that takes more than two minutes to respond to out of view, make sure you deal with those emails later)".
Yes, thank you. You still see them in your inbox view (due to multiple inbox) so you are still aware of them.
My point (and I was being a bit snide, sorry) was not that you haven't been clear enough - anyone who needs a picture to understand the end result hasn't been paying attention while reading - but that I don't count it as "inbox zero". It feels like cheating, like saying "here's how to completely clean all of the rubbish out of your living room: dump it in the kitchen".