When I hear professionals like Michael Reynolds of Spinweb discuss Inbox Zero (reaching a point where you have no emails in your inbox), I quietly snicker and mumble “Your mother is a hampster, and your father smelt of elderberries!”.
My inbox has over 3,000 messages. A couple months ago it was over 20,000 messages until I accidentally deleted 17,000. I didn’t care. Given my smug outlook (pun intended) on hoarding email, I never dreamed that I would actually get to Inbox Zero, though. I’m not even sure I ever cared about it – until now.
Good friend, Adam Small, told me about Mailbox – an app for Gmail that works with the iPhone. It’s brilliant… allowing 4 strokes on every message that allow you to archive, trash, add to a list, or swipe for later. The later option pops up a window that allows you to select later in the day, this evening, tomorrow, this weekend, next week, in a month, someday or pick a date!
This is ingenius -the later swipe is absolutely my favorite as I often don’t have time to read all the emails I get during the day due to client requests. I’m not at Inbox Zero and won’t be for a few weeks… but there’s finally hope!
Haha… it can happen, Doug! You just have to believe 🙂
Brilliant! hate having my emails clogged up !
Fine read. Thank you, Doug.
Mailbox is the best thing yet for processing emails on the go, and I’m a fan when I need to “process on the go”. Otherwise, I try to limit checking in with email on my mobile as I find it’s significantly slower than processing on a desktop.
For the desktop to increase productivity (like with mailbox), I use unrollme, boomerang and for contacts my own team has an app called WriteThat.name. Another great app for moving quickly to zero inbox is mailstrom.
Cheers,
Brad