It is popular now to blog about empty mailbox or "Inbox Zero" approach. That idea is now hot and most people even do not realize that exists alternate ways to manage a huge amount of e-mail and keep sanity. I'll show you the one.

First of all I need to say that I get tons of e-mails every day. I have nearly two dozens of e-mail accounts organized mostly on different activities and each of them continuously brings e-mail. It is hard to say precisely, but I surely receive more than one thousand e-mails every day including e-mail lists that I am subscribed. I can handle this amount of e-mail relatively easily, but I do not try to make inbox empty - it simply would take all my time and even more.

I'll try to show you in 5 steps how to be more effective than that people who try to make their inbox empty.

1. Powerful e-mail client significantly simplifies e-mail handling. The first thing I want to say is that good instrument always worth all money spent on it. I prefer Microsoft Outlook (full version, not Express) to manage my e-mail because it is almost infinitely flexible adapting to my needs. It is not cheap but definitely worth all money spent on it. There are a lot of other e-mail clients but I haven't seen anything that is close to Outlook. This point is important because e-mail client should be much more than just tool to download messages from server and read them, it should allow you to process and organize your messages in that way that fits your needs. And Outlook has one very useful feature: it allows to flag e-mails requiring action and you can view all flagged messages in special search folder. When e-mail is marked as "done" it disappears from that folder. Recently I switched all my e-mail lists to Gmail to save bandwidth and also because this service groups messages by subject in convenient threads and allows to label e-mails. The combination Outlook+Gmail works really good.

2. E-mails are not the same. Another important thing is that e-mail messages have different value: from useless spam to high priority correspondence with customers or top managers. As e-mails are different, we should react to them differently too: spam should be deleted, high priority e-mail should call for action and most other messages should be quickly scanned just for information. Of course, you do not have to answer to all incoming e-mail and most messages do not require anything more then reading them. Most e-mail clients distinguish read and unread messages. You can easily understand what messages where read and do not have to do anything like moving them to special folder just to make inbox empty, even more: it is dangerous for you productivity because doing anything that is not directly related to your tasks is a kind of procrastination (more about this in step 4).

3. Better store than delete. If you do not hunt for empty inbox you may store you messages inside inbox forever. Do you ever think why you have to delete your e-mail? Maybe to save space? But text messages take miserable part of disk space on modern computers, for messages with attachments just trim attachments. Maybe old e-mails can distract your attention? It is not serious argument, more better to leave you messages untouched because you don't know when you may need them again.

I know one instructive story with my friend:

His job was to support complex software system developed by outside organization. Although he was extremely good technical specialist, the system was enormous buggy and his work looked like hell. Anyway, day by day by spending hours to pull out important information from original developers by e-mail he achieved significant progress in stabilizing that system and adopting it to normal work. Though his boss was not satisfied with his progress and raised a question about his professional capabilities and was going to fire him. Just to show volumes of his work my friend printed out all correspondence with developers of the system and it took more than five hundred sheets of paper printed with small font on double sides. The boss understood that he was incorrect and doubled my friend's salary and later promoted him. Is it worth to tell what would be happen if my friend did not wisely store all correspondence and deleted all messages?

If you store all your e-mail you do not have to waste time to extract important information from it. For example here is reasonable recommendations how to manage serial numbers in Gmail (and this way is suitable for Outlook 2007 too).

4. Emptying inbox is a support operation. Doing anything else than solving your useful tasks even if it looks useful but it is not necessary, is a kind of procrastination. For any kind of useful task we can find a lot of relatively useful but absolutely not necessary support operations. For example, before writing report for you boss we can reorder all thing at our desk, but is it necessary for the report? Definitely, no. Emptying inbox is a kind of support operation: it may help you to organize your information but does not make your closer to your targets. If you simply deny idea to hunt for empty inbox, you will save considerable amount of time and energy to make your useful work.

5. Your inbox is not your To-Do list. Actually, it is the most important thing that I want to say. Relatively small part of e-mails requires action, most of actions such as replies could be managed using GTD 2-minute rule and only few e-mails require a new record in To-Do list. Of course, you can use your inbox as To-Do list and even send e-mail to yourself to put them in inbox, but for my opinion it is a bad idea because it is not good when anyone can make a new record in your To-Do list, isn't it? Remember: anybody can send e-mail to you, but only you alone should manage your To-Do list.

And now it is time to summarize: if you do not treat your inbox as To-Do list, you do not have to make it empty, even more: hunting for empty inbox is useless waste of time and energy. Powerful e-mail client will allow you to handle e-mail flexible and you can be far more productive if you do not even try to keep your inbox empty. And it is very useful for your sanity too.

And how to handle huge amount of emails I'll show you next time, please, subscribe to my feed.