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Neil Patel

How to Get Your Inbox Down to Zero and Keep it There

Neil Patel

Here at Neil Patel, we talk about all forms of online marketing for businesses, including email marketing. While beginner’s guides and email timing are important, there is also one other area that may not have a lot to do with marketing, but has everything to do with how effectively you can run your business (and personal life for that matter).

When you work online, you will find that the things that you need the most to maintain important business connections are also the things that will derail you from the path of productivity. Social media is well known to be filled with distractions. It is not the only place you’ll likely get into trouble though. There’s another online tool that can be just as distracting and disruptive to your productivity as it is a necessity. That tool is your inbox.

How Your Inbox Stops You from Getting Things Done

Your inbox can hinder your ability to get things done in two ways. The first are notifications. Even if you don’t have your email open on your desktop, you likely have alerts for new email set up on your smartphone. So if that alert goes off, your mind will always wander into thinking about what new email you just received. Sometimes that quick distraction is all it takes to get your focus off the task at hand.

Another way your inbox can stop you from getting things done is by being overloaded. I don’t know about you, but I work a lot more efficiently if I feel like I have a manageable to-do list. A flooded inbox with tons of emails waiting for responses does not feel manageable, and the more overloaded it gets, the less I want to deal with anything in it.

Why an Empty Inbox is a Happy Inbox

So why would you want to get your inbox down to zero? I like to look at an empty inbox at the end of the day as a day where everything that needed to get done was finished. Think of each email in your inbox as a task that needs to be completed. Email tasks generally boil down to the following four things:

  1. Someone needs you to complete something for them.
  2. Someone needs you to make a decision.
  3. Something needs to be filtered.
  4. Something needs to be deleted.

When you want to empty your inbox, you need to focus on doing one of the above four things. Now let’s look at how to do an initial cleanup of an overloaded inbox!

Cleaning Up Your Inbox

When I first decided that I wanted to get my inbox down to zero emails, I had to tackle about 300+ emails, some which dated several months back. But at that point, enough was enough. So I dedicated the weekend to start going through my emails, one by one, to see whether I could immediately do one of the four above things for each email.

At the end of the weekend, I had gotten things down to five emails in my inbox, all of which required me to finish a major project I was still working on. Everything else was moved out of the inbox by doing the following:

Sometimes, the toughest part of emptying out your inbox is finally saying no to something. I know many of my emails were hanging out in my inbox simply because they required me to say no to someone’s product review, guest post, event invitation, or some other request. Once you’ve started to say no to some things, it will make it easier to do in the future and leave your inbox open to receive more good requests that you will want to say yes to.

Keeping Your Inbox Clean

There are three great habits you need to adapt to if you want to keep your newly emptied inbox at zero.

Before I get into these, it’s important to think about how you use email. Some people use emails as a reminder that they need to be on a particular network or website to do something. By turning off notifications, you might miss out on those reminders to do something whereas you will remember them by filtering.

If you know you’ll be in HootSuite all day every day, then there’s no need to get an email notification every time you get a direct message. But if you know you only check your LinkedIn group when they send you the digest, then you might want to keep that email notification on but filter them from your inbox.

Now let’s move onto those good, inbox-cleaning habits.

1. Turn off unnecessary notifications.

Whenever you sign up for a new social network, forum, or other website, chances are you are going to be opt-in automatically to notification emails from that website. Be sure that when you sign up to a new website, you find your email notification settings and turn off the ones you do not need. Otherwise, you’ll have new emails for friend requests, new messages, offers, products, and a whole slew of other things you may not need bombarding your inbox.

Some popular networks’ email notification settings pages include the following. You’ll need to be logged in for these to work.

Another area where you might get a lot of emails is from blog commenting. For blogs using third-party commenting systems, you can change your notification settings globally by going to the following.

For commenting on other blogs using the base comment system, look for checkboxes before the submit button asking if you want to subscribe to comments. Sometimes these are automatically checked, especially if you have subscribed to comments from a previous post.

2. Filter anything you will not need to respond to immediately.

This is huge when it comes to keeping your inbox at a neat, manageable level. If it is an email you will not need to take an immediate action on, be sure to filter it. This includes:

Really, you can filter almost everyone and just keep an eye on the folders you filter them to, that way your inbox is only prioritizing new people that you might have to respond to the fastest. Some general filters that work well include the following.

One perk to Gmail over other email programs is that you can create a filter that will label specific emails but not automatically send them to the folders. That way, they will show up in your inbox so you can take action on them, then you can just easily click archive to move them to their folder for future reference. That way if the same person is always emailing you, you don’t have to keep scrolling through your labels / folders each time to organize their emails.

3. Unsubscribe to anything you’re not reading, don’t intent to read, or didn’t opt-in to immediately.

It sometimes feels faster to just delete something every time it hits your inbox. And, per email, it is. But if you are regularly deleting something without reading it, do you really want to continue letting it hit your inbox? Worse, do you want to stay subscribed to something you didn’t intentionally want to opt-in to in the first place?

Each time I get an email from someone I don’t recognize, I look for an unsubscribe or opt-out link on the email. You’ll usually find those links at the top or bottom of the email, especially ones that are in newsletter format or are from PR companies. It usually doesn’t take too long to unsubscribe, and it’s worth it not to have the next email from that list alerting your via your inbox notifications.

And for those particular nasty emailers who don’t have an unsubscribe link on their newsletters, I tend to mark them as spam and then create a filter to skip the inbox and delete them. This also goes for sites that make you try to login to an account that you don’t even remember creating to get to the unsubscribe option. It seems harsh, yet it’s the fastest way to go about things because you don’t want to spend all day trying to hunt someone down to remove you from their list.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

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