Getting to Inbox Zero

This is the first month I decide to take cleaning out and re-examining my relationship with my email inbox more seriously. It’s been on my to-do list for a while, but these weeks it really dawned on me. My email inbox needs to also reflect the amount of intention I am putting into designing my life, and that was the major motivation I needed to get started.

After watching a Youtuber’s video on his hacks of getting to an “Inbox Zero”, I knew what I had to do and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I first use a tool that I had used in the past called Unroll.me to 1) mass unsubscribe to things that are no longer relevant to me and 2) to manage the “rollups” that I have created. I’ve started to notice that even though the tool was helpful in making my inbox feel clean, it also encouraged more collecting behavior and I wanted to change that. Next, I configured my inbox according to the Youtuber’s recommendations to have three labels appear in my Gmail:
A: Action Items
B: Awaiting Reply
C: Read Through Later

Finally, it was time to face the music and I had to archive at least 200,000 emails (I never had a good habit of archiving…) while creating some filters to start understanding how to create a more dynamic system to manage and keep track of my emails.

The goal of all of this, like all systems, is not to assume that my pain points will be solved in one day, but for the first time ever I am excited to take baby steps to continue to find a way to make technology serve the best version of myself, and that’s exciting as hell!

Onwards!