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Goal:

The main goal if this method is that your e-mail inbox always remains empty. This way you will not lose or forget any important e-mails.

How:

If you’re like most people chances are that you have hundreds of e-mails in your work or private inbox, however this is an inefficient way to organise your e-mails and tasks. So instead you should keep your inbox empty all the time.

Once you decide to read e-mails, just open your e-mail software and start reading your e-mails. The ones where you have nothing to do and are not relevant in the future should be deleted immediately. The ones which require your action should be handled immediately if the tasks take less than 2-5 minutes, and the e-mails could be deleted or replied. After replying you should archive these messages or keep them in a waiting for answer folder, if you need to follow them up. Messages which you might need later or would like to keep as reference should be put into some archive folders, which could be organised by topic.

Unsubscribe from all e-mails you wouldn’t like to receive. I recommend that you remove all tabs in gmail, as this will just clutter your inbox even more and you’ll never know which type of e-mail ends up where.

Don’t start your e-mail software in the morning. Start it twice a day, for example once after lunch and once in the evening. If you have the e-mail running it will just disturb you many times a day, and it takes at least 10-20 minutes to switch back to your original context once you were disturbed. You will receive urgent tasks per skype or personally, or if in e-mail, you can still request others to contact you on one of these channels instead of by e-mail. I’m doing this since months and never had a problem with it. Also don’t start reading your e-mails in the morning, as this is the time when you have the most energy, so you should spent on the most important tasks.