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I have been out of town quite a bit over the last 9 days, training for a new role as a recruiter/trainer for a marketing company, and my e-mail In-boxes have been neglected. That is to say, I handled the urgent and important items, but filed the rest away.

I spent two hours this morning getting caught up.

Lesson learned: do not let your In-boxes pile up! Just in time comes an e-mail post from Nick at Put Things Off (but that’s what I was doing!) about how to reach e-mail heaven. I have been using my Thunderbird client to handle this, but with being on the road so much, I may have to get back to a straight Gmail system:

The Inbox Heaven Rules

These rules are a combination of my own experience using and refining Inbox Heaven, with inspiration from Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation, which was in turn sparked off by David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

I’d also like to acknowledge that I’m not the first person to suggest using a Gmail account as your only Inbox — I’m just the first to put all the steps you need on one page, add a picture of a gremlin, and glue it all together with some concrete rules to keep you on track.

The 5 Rules

Rule 1) Delete as much as you can. If in doubt, delete it.
Rule 2) If it needs action within two weeks, star and archive it.
Rule 3) Archive anything else that you’ll need after two weeks.
Rule 4) Twice a day, take action on all your starred items.
Rule 5) Delete, archive, or star-and-archive every email as it comes in.

My new phone can access e-mail from Gmail very easily, but I have other accounts that I use, and will have to add this to my Project list for next week. Check it out, and let me know if you already do this!

Note: For those of you who say, “But Gmail doesn’t have folders! I need my folders!!” Nick has this for a reply:

8. Use your labels like folders. When you do label an email, use a hierarchical structure. The way I use labels is to imagine them as folders, separated by a hyphen. For example, I use the initials “PTO” for important Put Things Off email, then have a list of “subfolders” separated by a hyphen. For example, I currently have “PTO-advertisers”, “PTO-book”, and “PTO-guestposts” amongst my labels.

I have the same for other areas — each one gets an initial for the project and a subfolder separated by a hyphen. Try it — it makes your labels really easy to scan.

Now why didn’t I think of that? Thanks Nick.

BTW: Does anyone have any advice re: using shared office space? E-mail me about the good, bad, and ugly - stephen [at] hdbizblog [dot] com.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6dryt6. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen