Productivity Hack: Clean Inbox

Definition

To achieve clean inbox is to keep the number of emails in your inbox constantly at 0 after you process them.

Why Clean Inbox

At work, our inbox is more than just a tool for person-to-person communication – it serves as a hub for all sorts of notifications, those from Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, Github, etc. Having a clean inbox allows me to stay on top of every moving piece and focus on what really matters.

Summary

Here is a high-level summary of email statuses and their corresponding actions that help me reach this goal.

Email Status	Action
Emails I never need to read	Filter + Skip inbox
Emails I read but need to revisit	Snooze
Emails I read and processed	Archive

Explanations

Broadly speaking, status of any emails falls under one of the three buckets below:

1. Those you never need to read
2. Those you read but need to revisit
3. Those you read and processed

For each status, there is an action to help achieve clean inbox. Gmail is used for the examples below.

• Filter: create Gmail filters and mark those emails you will never read (Status #1) as “Skip Inbox“. This will reduce the amount of emails going to your inbox significantly and keep you focused on what really needs your attention.
• Snooze: Gmail allows you to snooze an email until a future point. This will remove the email from your inbox and re-surface it when it’s the time. It allows you to punt on any non-urgent emails that require actions from you (Status #2), and motivates you to better plan your day or week by setting the revisit time.
• Archive: By archiving emails, you explicitly remove those emails you already read and processed (Status #3) from your inbox. If you effectively use Archive alongside Snooze, the only emails left in your inbox are unread emails.

Personal Experience

I used to let every email sit in my inbox. This approach had a problem – I cannot differentiate those I already read and processed vs. those I read but need to revisit, because they all look the same once I click on them. Needless to say, this is not efficient and creates unnecessary cognitive load.

It took me weeks to get used to this archiving + snoozing style after my colleague first introduced me to this approach. At the beginning it felt weird and unintuitive to add a few steps in addition to the action of reading. The power of clean inbox started to manifest itself after I was able to hit the goal at least once a week, especially before the end of a week – this gives me a full closure of the past week and motivation to start a new one since I know things are under control.

Once the ideal state is reached, maintaining the state becomes a pleasure. It’s not an exaggeration whatsoever – my brain craves that “No new mail!” message. When a new email arrives, I feel the positive vibe of getting things back to the state of “clean”, compared to the feeling of overwhelming or procrastinating when there are 20+ emails waiting for me to process.