Inbox Zero. It’s the holy grail of anyone who uses email as a primary form of communication. My inbox is empty right now. Completely empty. It took months to get there, mostly because I kept letting it get filled up again with complete crap. It will probably get full again, but my goal is to keep it below 10 as much as possible.

If you’re like me, you treat your inbox like a to do list. If it’s in there, it’s an actionable item, and you’ll leave it there until you can cross it off your list. (Because otherwise if you delete or archive the email, you’ll forget to do it.) Then, important emails get buried and you miss out on them.

Here are the things I’ve done over the past few weeks to get to a beautifully empty inbox.

This is the most beautiful site these eyes have ever seen.

(Note: I use Gmail and all the Google properties, including Google Calendar and Google Tasks. This has also helped keep me organized because everything is interrelated. Some of this information is based on what I can do with Gmail.)

1) Delete the crap and dreck.

Before you do anything else, go through all your email newsletters, semi-interesting advertisements, and other pieces of information you thought you’d find a few extra minutes to read. If you have’t read it by now, you’re not going to find the time. If it’s an ad, a solicitation, or a special offer you signed up for, get rid of it. This is like junk mail. You wouldn’t keep piles of junk mail and newspapers in your house “just in case,” so do the same for your inbox.

2) Create a label or folder and archive emails.

If you have important emails that you need to save about a certain project, client, or topic, create a folder, and put those emails in that folder. If you use Gmail, create a filter to apply a specific label for that project, client, or topic, and then archive it. When you need to recall it, click on that label, and all those emails will appear. If you store everything in folders, then search through that particular folder.

3) Delete or archive anything older than 2 months.

This is especially important if you’re the kind of person who saves all your emails in your inbox. I’ve known people who have more than five thousand emails in their inbox. Not their entire email folder. Their inbox. There is no reason you have to keep these handy. They’re not doing you any good, because if you’re treating your inbox like a to do list, those action items have lo-o-o-o-ng since expired. Just dump any emails you don’t need, and archive the ones you might.

4) Add actionable items to a to do list.

Copy the important information into the notes. I use Google Tasks, and there is a place for notes with each task. I can also type in specific keywords, the date, and the people involved, so I can search for that particular email later. And by archiving — Gmail has a great searchable archive that makes finding old emails a breeze — I get those things out of my inbox. Similarly, if it’s information I need to keep, I’ll copy and paste it into my Evernote so I can find it later.

If you’ve got stuff you need to take care of in the next day or two, leave those items out for now.

5) Do important actionable items right away.

By this point, you should only have a few emails left — things you have to get to right away, deadlines to meet, answers to send, appointments to schedule. I try to work in 15 minute blocks and plow through as many emails as I can in this fashion. If someone needs a reply, I send it. If I have to read something, I do it fast. Plow through all the necessary items as fast as you can, even if it means scheduling an appointment with yourself to keep that time blocked.

Important: Don’t just file actionable emails into a To Do file. That may be a real Inbox Zero trick, but to my mind, it’s cheating. You don’t just file stuff away to have an empty inbox. You actually do the things you’re getting the emails for. If you can’t do them, leave them in the inbox until you can. But if you feel the burning desire to hit Inbox Zero, then pull the emails into your To Do list, or copy and paste the information into a document on your desktop. But filing for later is not the best option.

To maintain Inbox Zero, I jealously guard my inbox from all intruders, and I treat each one like an incoming task. Here are the ways I get rid of those emails to keep them from piling up again:

1. Skim and delete newsletters. Unsubscribe from any that don’t catch my interest. If I’ve received it five times and never opened it, I unsubscribe from it.
2. Respond to easy questions immediately, and archive the emails. If a response is coming back, there’s no reason to keep the email in my inbox. It will pop back in soon enough when the other person replies.
3. Schedule responses for appropriate times. If you have Outlook, you’ve always been able to do this. I just started using Gmail on Chrome recently, and I got the Boomerang extension, which allows me to schedule replies and responses. If I work ahead on an answer to a client or colleague but they don’t need the answer right away, I schedule my reply for a future delivery, and then archive the email.
4. Filter particular emails like newsletters I want to keep, and have them delivered straight to a particular folder, bypassing the inbox. Then I can read them when I have the time, but they won’t sit in my inbox.
5. Ruthlessly delete unnecessary emails. Be a jerk about it. If something doesn’t grab my interest right that second, dump it. I don’t keep it, hoping it will be relevant in a few days. If I really want to keep something, I’ll put it in a special folder called “to do eventually.” I created that folder six months ago, in the hopes that I would find time to go back to those “maybe I oughta” emails, and haven’t pulled anything out of it since. I haven’t missed anything since then either.
6. Use Boomerang to have emails pop back into my inbox. If I don’t want to add something to my to do list, Boomerang can help. I can archive or hide a message and have it come back to my inbox at a certain time. When it shows up, I’ll deal with it at that moment. This is different from filing stuff into a To Do folder, mostly because I say it is. No other reason.

So that’s what I’ve done to achieve Inbox Zero, and what I’ve been doing to keep it clutter free. What do you do? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations? What about you real Inbox Zero practitioners? What are some of the best ways you’ve found to work clutter free?

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Email is NOT going away.

South African blogger Arthur Charles Van Wyk thinks Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg is just a bit crazy when she says that email is going to die off, because only 11% of teens are using email these days. (You can watch the video below.)

Email is not obsolete. Not yet, anyway.

The premise is an interesting one: if you want to figure out what kind of consumer technology we’ll be using in several years, look at what the teens are using right now. And the teens aren’t using email, they’re using SMS on cell phones, or they’re using social networks like Facebook.

Does this mean that we will all write in text speak? Will sexting become an appropriate form of communication?

I don’t care what anyone says. Email is not, NOT NOT going to die off. Here are 5 reasons email is not going away:

1. Email is widely used in the business world. We’ve got so many companies using it, it’s never going to be dislodged, at least not in my lifetime. Until someone finds an easier way to transfer large documents and files only to specific individuals, it’s going to be the communication tool of choice. Can you see corporations — many of whom were reluctant to start letting people get email addresses and Internet access in the first place — dropping a tool that they fought against adopting? They’re still using fax machines, for God’s sake! So, sure teenagers aren’t using it now, but wait until they get assimilated into the corporate collective. They’ll be forced to use it whether they want to or not.
2. How do you get notified when you get a new friend, get tagged in a photo, have someone comment on your status update? Right now it’s by email. Do you really want your phone to buzz every time someone wants to be your Farmville friend on Facebook, or responds to someone else’s status update? While everyone likes their mobile phones, getting buzzed by an abundance of social network messages is going to get tiresome.
3. Our mobile phones can only hold so many texts. I have emails from 5 years ago that I still need to keep, but I can’t say the same for text messages. But if I did what happens if my cell phone gets too full? And then what if I lose it? Sure, those things can be saved in the cloud, but that’s where my email messages are anyway. Plus, my emails are easier to organize and search for.
4. Mobile phones and text messages are not ideal for important communications. While email may be less formal than, say, a certified letter, it’s more formal than a text message. What kind of damage are you doing to your personal brand if you tell a potential employer, “just text me,” especially if you’re someone who got a cell number that spells a naughty word? Or what if you got a job offer (or didn’t)? Do you want to get “Dude, u r not hired. Sry. Better luck nxt time” from an employer? Communicating with people who will be important to your life needs to be done in a way that’s more dignified than a cell phone.
5. Email is free, text messaging is not. I have to pay $10 every month to get unlimited texting, but my Gmail account is free. Admittedly neither cell phones nor computers are in every home in this country, but while text messages still cost money — even though they cost the cell carriers nothing to send (don’t get me started on that!) — it’s going to be a barrier for people to adopt it wholesale around the country

Email may not be the communication tool of choice, but it’s not going anywhere. And while SMS will become more prevalent in this country, I don’t believe it’s going to kill email, and I think people who say so are doing it for shock. We haven’t even killed postal mail, and yet the hip thing to do is to declare the death of free mail?

Kill off postal mail first, and then I’m more likely to believe you.

Photo credit: Jparise (Flickr)

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Funny story.

A lot of social media pundits have tried to make some headlines by predicting the demise of email at the hands of texting, Twitter, and other social media networks. (So said Dan Applequist in November 2008, Shakespeare the Engineer said it in July 2008).

Turns out they got it backward.

According to a recent study by the Nielsen company (yeah, the TV people), social media junkies are actually using email more, not less.

They wanted to test the hypothesis that heavy social media users had cut back on their email usage, but it turns out that hypothesis was incorrect.

Now, when I was in graduate school, they taught us that if your research didn’t fit your hypothesis, you rewrote your hypothesis, rather than redoing your research.

Nielsen didn’t do either. They took it on the chin, and said that the research didn’t back up their hypothesis, and published what they did learn.

The researchers did state that the increased email usage might be because “social media sites like Facebook (that) send messages to your in-box every time someone comments on your posting or something you’ve participated in, and depending on your settings, can send updates on almost every activity.”

So while email may be on the way out, it’s not going to die anytime soon. It’s become too firmly entrenched in the business community, it’s an easy way to transfer large files, and a great way to communicate when it needs to be read later without being missed. And while the Millennials may shudder everytime they think about it, their parents and grandparents are still using email.

So until everyone over 30 is dead, email is going to be here to stay.

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