If you follow me on twitter, you would know I have been cleaning out my inbox all day. I went from exactly 3390 emails to just zero in my inbox. The Gmail search functionality just kicks ass compared to that of Thunderbird. It would probably have taken me a few months to get the same result using any other email client.

A now, completely empty inbox. Pretty scary huh?

A Solid Inbox Strategy

I didn’t want to just clean everything out; I also wanted to get some sort of strategy in place so that I wouldn’t end up in the same mess in a couple of weeks. I adapted/extended Gina’s ‘Trusted Trio’ to better suit my needs. Gina is very tough with her: ‘Just Three Labels’ system, but unlike me, she probably have several hundred emails to get through every day. I like things to be a little bit more organised so I sat up a few more labels to help me out..

Spring Cleaning

First of all I completely molested Gmail’s search box and filters to get rid of everything I didn’t need. I deleted all the crazy Facebook, Flickr and other completely useless notifications from eBay and PayPal. I made sure I didn’t delete my sent message by putting a ‘–in:sent’ in most of the queries, but take a look at the syntax and try for yourself. Filters are pretty handy if you want to quickly get rid of all your junk. The favourite query for me was ‘in:anywhere –in:sent -kasper’ my first name filtered out an insane amount of SPAM. Obviously this wouldn’t have worked if my email address had been kasper@gmail.com.

Labels: Three or Ten?

The perfect Gmail setup

I filtered my ‘All Mail’ folder down to 524 of which a few hundreds of them, were ‘Sent Messages’. I set up 10 static labels and a few dynamic ones which I intend to use for things such as clients and stuff that will be relevant for a while but can eventually go into the archives.

As you can see I have the ‘Trusted Trio’ at the very top, the prefixes for all the categories are just to keep them in order.

1. -1FollowUp is for messages that take more than 2 minutes to respond to, if it takes less, just respond on the spot. The idea is to keep your inbox empty at all times.
2. -2Hold are emails that you want to keep around for a few days or possibly a week or two.
3. -3Archive is for everything that you want to keep but doesn’t need right now. Bee crude and delete 95% of all your emails, – you know you will never need them.

If you are happy with this ‘three labels and out’ then, you practically don’t need any more. Gmail’s search feature is so exceptionally powerful that no labels can make up for it.

I also created the ‘Grumpy Quartet’ and the ‘Dynamic Trio’. The ‘Grumpy Quartet’ is for emails that will definitely come back and bite you at some point in time. This is where I save all my family and friends messages, just to prove them wrong whenever they try to convince me that they emailed me the correct date and time when they did not. It’s for all my Uni work that I need to get around to at some point, and for the receipts you can never find when you need them. I also occasionally like to save a few fly fishing notes in there.

The Dynamic trio are taken care of by filters; they don’t go into my inbox but are still marked as unread. Just set up a filter like ‘From: @ebay’ and filter those into your eBay Label. The ‘Social’ label takes care of all my Facebook, Flickr and Twitter activity.

My inbox is now completely empty, it’s a pretty lonely sight at first but I’m sure I will get used to it.