I found out through a comment on my blog post that Inbox Zero is a bigger "movement" than I originally thought. Merlin Mann from 43Folders gave a great talk at Google about it. It's 1 hour long, but it is worth spending 1 hour to save thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours for the rest of your life.
My first action after watching the video was to turn off all Outlook email notifications. No more beep, change mouse cursor, desktop alert or anything else. I'm even thinking of having Outlook closed for long periods during the day.
So far I've been 3 days doing that and I feel like a new person. It feels that I just discovered email for the first time. It's useful and good!
Contrary to what I thought about Inbox Zero is that you don't have to have an empty inbox. It's ok to have emails that wait there, but they have to be waiting to be read. If you read it, Merlin recommends one of 5 actions:
- Delete (Archive)
- Delegate
- Reply
- Defer (add to Calendar/Task List)
- Do
He is good at explaining each one has their own way of organizing things, so people should find what works for them. But one thing that I'll do immediatelly is to get rid of all the folder (taxonomy) structure on my Email. His point is that if you need to think where an email goes, in terms of which folder, you are already spending too much time with it. Put everything in the "archived" folder and use search to find it later.
Here is 43Folders collection of posts and interesting things on how to do Inbox Zero.
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