A few months ago I made a public commitment to practicing Inbox Zero for a month. I cleaned out my inbox daily for a month, I still am, and I intend to continue doing so.
It has made my inbox a happy place instead of a guilt-inducer. I feel I am more responsive - and I hope people who have emailed feel that way as well - and in particular no people should be slipping through the cracks and be ignored.
Now, I must admit that I do cheat on occassion. A few times an email that I simply couldn’t be bothered dealing with at the time - or that I knew I would be dealing with in a short while - have been allowed to stay in my inbox. But other than those few times I have gone to sleep with an empty email inbox.
An empty, non-work inbox, that is. I still haven’t tackled my email inbox at work. The primary reason for this, is the fact that I haven’t yet set up a to do list that I can forward my emails to. For my personal and freelance stuff, I use GooToDo, but that unfortunately throws everything into one huge list, meaning my work tasks would be mixed with my private stuff which I don’t want.
I hearthily recommend you read Merlin Manns introduction to Inbox Zero and try it out for a while if you feel opening your email client has become a burden. Email is meant to make communication easier, not to bog you down.
I read your original post about inbox zero and read the article as well. So I decided to try it out too, and it works very well for me.
I’m glad it worked out for you too :)
After reading your post, and reading a little on 43Folders, I was like, “huh? Why do I need this?”. But after listening to Merlin Mann on MacBreak Weekly, I found that this guy maybe knew what he was talking about, so I tried it out. And I works great. And now I go around trying to get everybody else to use the same principles.
Instead of using an online application to order my to-do-list, I use iCal and a little script that can create an to-do-item from an email. Quite nifty, actually.
Forgot this: The great thing about iCal is that the different to-do-items are associated with the different calenders. So I wont be one big list of to-do’s.