Mon, 27 Aug 2007
Inbox Zero
Inbox Zero suggests keeping my INBOX to having zero items in it. Recently I received an email that was informative rather than had information I needed to act on, and it struck me: Why do I use my INBOX as an archive?
So I'm going to try this idea out. (I first heard of it while surfing Planet Debian.) I've been using IMAP labels in (al)pine in a similar fashion to the way Merlin Mann suggests using email, but the big difference is that when an email is dealt with, I don't make it visually go away. So sometimes I dig through INBOX to see what I forgot to deal with.
I actually found the Inbox Zero web site very hard to use. Here are the lessons I've extracted so far:
INBOX is a place emails go before you act on them
The available action space is:
- delete (Okay, I'm not going to do that)
- archive (>90% of my mail is informative rather than actionable)
- defer (save to reply-to-me for later sprints)
- generate an action from it (save to act-on-me for later sprints)
- reply right now (if it'll take <2 minutes)
Disable auto-check
"Are you checking the email, Yakov, or is it checking you?"
This means both disabling my instinct to auto-check as well as the technology that auto-checks every minute. Every 30m or 60m is okay. I'm not quite sure what to do about the system monitoring alerts, though.
Do email in dashes
Defragment the day; see the Yakov link above.
