I receive about 20 emails a day I have to answer. Then another 100 or so notifications. I have nothing in my inbox right now, and nothing left to answer. Gmail makes it possible. With some aggressive filtering and a greasemonkey script, my email habits have changed drastically.
The picture above shows my email box. I know that there is one person I should attend to (the one under friends), but that the answer to this can likely wait a few days. There is nothing important from “Work” pending. The social media stuff is totally unimportant and I can deal with it when I want.
The system
It’s simple. Every single email that arrives in my in-box is immediately put in a filter. If it is work related, all further emails from this person skip the in-box and go into my work filter. If it is a friend, this person lands in the ‘Friend’ filter. After a year of doing this, things that land in my in-box are usually from people or services I have never interacted with.
The system works because the unread count of each filter tells me what is left to do. If I have a high unread count on social media, it does not bother me, because who cares about twitter, right? If my ‘Work’ label has 5 items, I already start working on it.
The last thing is to apply minimalist gmail to remove all the visual clutter from gmail.
How to set it up
1. Set up filters to skip the in-box
2. Enable Hide Read Labels
that will take away all your labels if there is nothing unread in them, like this:
That’s basically it! From now on, your in-box will be pretty neat and even if you receive a lot of email, you will feel a lot more in control of it.
