Why Zero?

About two thirds of the people I talk with about email feel indentured to their email inbox. They feel chained to it for hours a day and stressed by the large and growing number of unattended emails that sit there waiting for action.

I recently tried a suggestion from David Allen to empty my inbox every day. Outrageous? Perhaps, but for the last 6 weeks my inbox has been empty once on most days.

Interestingly, this works for reasons other than I expected.

With the perspective of experience, it is clear that the problem with a big inbox is the old important versus urgent dilemma. It seems that human nature elevates the importance of things left in the inbox. They nag at us and demand attention lest the onslaught of new email bury them. In reality, many inbox items are not that important. They are artificially elevated in importance because they are sitting in the inbox.

David’s solution suggests that you move everything requiring action out of the inbox into the place where all your work is managed. This enables you to manage email not in isolation, but in the context of your other priorities.

Before you start moving emails out of your inbox to your work management system, you must pay heed to an other part of David’s email solution, the “two minute rule.” His rule holds that any email that can be disposed of in less than two minutes is handled then and there. I’ve found that processing most of my emails takes less than two minutes.

In addition to this solving the priority problem, it gets your work “out of your head” and into your system; a chief tenant of David’s system. With a large inbox, I was spending too much time trying to remember what was in my inbox instead of integrating email requests into my work and project lists.

So what are the benefits? First, my inbox is not nagging at me every time I look at my computer. Second, my work is more efficient since those “urgent but not important” emails are given their proper priority. Third, I am no longer concerned about losing things in my inbox – all of my work goes to my lists and gets handled. And fourth, you can’t imagine how good an empty inbox feels.

Before I started this, I thought it would be difficult. In the end only the “starting’” was difficult, the “doing” is not all that hard – and the time and productivity gains are worth it.

And is Spam a Problem?

In order to take your inbox to zero, you need a spam solution that works. The best I have found is Cloudmark which uses a social network approach to identify spam and remove it from all of the network members’ computers.

Other spam filters have given me a few costly false positives since they mark some legitimate email from people not in my address book as spam. As a result, I have had to review all of my spam looking for initial emails from prospective clients and companies associated with existing clients.

I can report that with Cloudmark I have had no false positives in a sample of 25,000 spam messages and that I no longer feel the need to review my spam. I see about eight false negatives a day which I mark with a single click which reports them back to Cloudmark so others won’t see them.

The service costs $5.00 a month, but this is the one that works. Highly recommended.