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30 Days of Inbox Zero: How I Did it

waxman.me

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Re: 30 Days of Inbox Zero: How I Did it

#11

Post by graeme »

lincolnq wrote: post #10

Another recommendation I would make (either to get to zero or get yourself to stay there) is to pre-commit to your goal using Beeminder ( http://www.beeminder.com ), which will make you pay money if you don't hit a target each day. (Don't worry, it only counts "read" emails so you don't have to worry about emails coming in and causing you to go off track)

Is there a good "getting started with beeminder" guide? I tried Beeminder, and had no idea how to use it.

Re: 30 Days of Inbox Zero: How I Did it

#14

Post by yincrash »

beachstartup wrote: post #9

i get probably 1000 messages a day. inbox zero was never a goal of mine, and never will be. i'm not really sure what the point of it would be. seems futile. i have 3 things that help me keep my mail organized (my startup runs its own postfix+dovecot mail server) * mail client on dedicated vertical 24" monitor * procmail (mailing lists, alerts, tickets) * spamd (spam) everything else hits my inbox, and if i don't dele…

yeah, unread 0 seems way better than having an empty inbox. what's the overall benefit with having 0 inbox over unread 0?

Re: 30 Days of Inbox Zero: How I Did it

#17

Post by garrickvanburen »

As of yesterday I've been at Inbox Zero for 47 days. Before that my longest streak was 8 days. For me Inbox Zero is all about not having loose ends at the end of the day.

How I did it: 1) liberal unsubscribe. 2) ruthless delete. 3) scheduled time on my calendar to reply.

I remember on day 26 one message I didn't want to deal with stuck in my inbox. At the thought of breaking the streak I re-read the message and scheduled 30 minutes the following morning to reply.

Re: 30 Days of Inbox Zero: How I Did it

#18

Post by vladgur »

I would never give access to my email account to a fly-by-night SAAS service. Nevermind the privacy concerns of mining my data, I just wouldnt trust their security practices unless they prove otherwise. An email nowadays is considered your identity. Any breaches to it can have a number of social, professional and financial implications.

Case in point, unroll.me mentioned in this article has a number of issues [1] [2] and response of Josh Rosenwald, founder of unroll.me at [3] dismisses that risk for perceived convenience.

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SimonPhipps/posts/fJQZbGuoY9G

[2] http://startup-stuttgart.de/unroll-me-complete-mail-data-tre...

[3] http://startup-stuttgart.de/unroll-me-complete-mail-data-tre...

P.S. previous discussion of unroll.me security hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7035724

Re: 30 Days of Inbox Zero: How I Did it

#19

Post by fishtoaster »

Jemaclus wrote: post #15

I feel like I'm the only person in the world who doesn't have this problem, even though I get a bajillion emails a day. Why is it so hard to hit Inbox Zero?

I would imagine it depends heavily on your email load. I get plenty of email, but the majority of it is automated, so with my gmail fitlers, I have only 2-3 per day that I actually need to read.

OP, on the other hand, is the founder of Grouper, and presumably gets dozens or hundreds of emails from real people requesting his time, input, or other resources. As such, there's significantly more effort involved in determining that a given email isn't worth responding to.

I don't know what your situation is, but I would imagine OP has significantly more real-person mail than the average HN poster.

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