This document discusses the Inbox Zero method for managing email created by Merlin Mann. It recommends getting a simple system to process email by converting messages to actions like deleting, delegating, responding, deferring, or doing. Processing email involves more than just checking messages but less than fully responding, with the goal of keeping the inbox empty.
Created by Merlin Mann
Based on GTD (Getting Things Done) by David Allen
David Allen calls GTD advanced common sense
Email has become part of our lives. Don’t let it become an avalanche.
This is about how to triage your email. Triage means determining priority.
Reducing the number of options something could be and making it a limited number of verbs of what you can do with stuff.
People live in their inbox.
People use their inbox as a task reminder, to do list, calendar. Scroll through inbox and decide which meeting to go to.
Your inbox should be for items you haven’t read yet.
We are knowledge workers which mean we add value to information.
Our two most precious natural resources are our time and attention.
While our time and attention are finite, the demands on our time and attention are infinite.
Size of a box is our time and attention and things filling it aren’t bound by the box.
Email gets things from one place to another. No reason to live in email.
Single place for anything? Different for all of us, where it lives is your choice.
Never check your email without processing.
This is an action based system.
Default state of email isn’t let it sit here until you start weeping.
Since this is action based system you have to take an action on each email. It’s not just reading, hopefully absorbing the info, and leaving it.
But the good news is, it’s less than responding.
You don’t have to respond to 200 emails.
You have to process 200 emails.
What actions do you have as a result of this email?
What does this message mean to me?
What if any action is required?
What is the most elegant way to close out this msg?
Gold and fools gold in email.
Action based, actions are verbs
Processing can be simplified to 5 verbs.
If this email has no place in your life, get rid of it.
Another aspect of delete is archive.
Only need a single folder for archive. Not some byzantine folder system with 24 levels.
This email is 2010, June, project related, but needs to be cross referenced with emails from owner that also goes in the Corporate folder.
System needs to be the most minimally byzantine structure that will allow you to find what you need.
(Remember, get a system, but keep it simple).
Is this email better for someone else to do?
Or should it have gone to someone else to begin with?
If you’re still ultimately responsible for the action give yourself some sort of reminder for follow-up. External task system. Not external to Outlook, good task/to do app. External to your Inbox.
Create a @follow-up or @waiting for tag
Or add it to your calendar
Convert the item to an action.
If the response will take 5 sentences or less, reply to it.
If that’s the end, DELETE!
Guy Kawasaki,
How to write a five sentence email. Whether you’re young or old, the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.
Intriguing website http://five.sentenc.es
Explain the problem in a sentence, explains the solution in a sentence and give you a signature to add to your email.
That way people won’t think you’re being terse, they’ll see you’re being efficient.
Or maybe you are being terse, maybe you’re from New England and you’re naturally taciturn.
Also two.sentenc, three.sentenc, and four.sentenc
This email is something you’re not going to deal with now.
Maybe you need more information before replying.
Create a @reply context or put it in a To Respond folder.
Create a task and convert it to an action.
Hopefully this folder will be empty at the end of the day.
If you can do this now. Go do it.
If all you need to do is walk this down the aisle, knock this action out.
Liberate activity out of the inbox.
Shift in thinking that the Inbox is where things are captured.
Don’t use it as a to do list.
Don’t use it as a calendar.
Don’t live out of your inbox.
Goal is to Create a processing habit.
