Comments on: Inbox Zero

By: Stewart Marshall

Stewart Marshall — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:33:14 +0000

Great – thanks! Just blogging about your post 🙂

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:19:16 +0000

@stewart: ah… I misread it. Thought it was chatspeak for “see ya” – as in you may have thought I had deleted emails from you? Dunno… As for the Cover Your Ass part of that acronym, important messages are stored in the Deadmail folder. But email really isn’t the best CYA model, anyway. If a business relationship is so bad that you need to document every piece of communication, is it really worth it? I’d rather not deal with that. But, I do keep important messages (agreements about timelines, status of projects, etc…)

By: Stewart Marshall

Stewart Marshall — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:07:41 +0000

Hey Darcy,

How does your reply @stewart answer my question what is CYA? I’m confused!

By: Bryan Alexander

Bryan Alexander — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 22:55:45 +0000

I just started this approach, and it’s already helping keep my inbox down.
Hardest thing is not checking email.

By: Raj

Raj — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:52:43 +0000

I am one of those who hates to have anything in my inbox – if there is something there, it’s something that I have yet to respond to, otherwise, everything else gets dumped off to an archive (flagged if it needs to be followed up on later). At work, this is a little bit harder, but gmail is great for that as things can get tagged to reflect what needs to be done.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:47:50 +0000

Excellent! I’ve been doing the empty inbox thing with GTD principles for about a year now. Although I don’t follow GTD proper any longer (I mostly switched to the Forster DIT philosophy), the empty inbox and the immediate action on messages, even to queue up for longer responses, has remained…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:50:38 +0000

@d: yup. that’s me 🙂 It does feel pretty good to have a clear inbox, though…

By: davidicus

davidicus — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:03:46 +0000

brag, brag, brag

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:51:57 +0000

@Joshua: I’m trying to merge Mail and iGTD to manage the contexts for actions. The lack of non-.Mac syncing is a bit of a PITA, though.

@Stewart: I didn’t just delete them – I only deleted stuff that was (1) non-actionable and (2) non-longterm-informational. Stuff that was crucial for a project got punted into Deadmail, where Mail.app nicely searches it. Most other things are reproducible online. Like blog comments, account info, etc… No need to archive emails for that stuff…

@Patrick: I’m trying your technique – inbox only for actionable items that have yet to be done. Essentially a to-do list. non-actionable stuff gets deleted immediately. Actionable stuff gets, well, actioned, or left until it has been.

@Merlin: Thanks! I’m a huge fan of 43Folders! Congrats on your Google presentation. You kicked some royal ass. Kudos.

By: Merlin

Merlin — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:26:12 +0000

Good on ya, D’Arcy!

(PS: longtime fan)