Zero Inbox — one of the great accomplishments of any productive day. I’m a big fan of the Zero Inbox methodology. The theory in a nutshell is when you process your email, read the email and think of “what do I need to do with this email?” If it’s something that can be answered right away (less than 2 minutes), then reply directly and then archive the email. If it’s something that I need to look something up, talk to someone else about it, or would just take too long to reply back, then I mark it with a date to process later and archive it. If it’s something like a response to a question that I had for someone, an advertisement, or just something that I don’t need to deal with, then I just mark it with a keyword and archive it.

The idea here is to clean out your inbox, and then when you come to your review of your tasks for the day, you will be able to see what emails need addressing at that time. Before I adopted this method, I found that there would be a few emails that would slip through the cracks. Someone would inevitably call me asking about something that was referred to in an email 2 weeks ago. Then I’d be stuck, because I knew I read it, just forgot about it because something else came up. With this method, each and every email gets dealt with in its own way.

I will go into this with more detail later, but if anyone has any questions on this, feel free to ask. It’s something that has totally changed the way I handle my email and just makes things SO much easier.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous