I’ve blogged before about how to handle email overload, but people often ask me how specifically I would suggest do it. So here are 11 simple concrete steps showing you how to get to zero inbox and maintain it with not-too-much-effort.

1. Sign up for Gmail. Yes, I’m biased, I work for Google, etc, etc. But quite frankly, I haven’t seen another email application that handles email as well from an overload perspective. Feel free to use any other email client, but your mileage may wary.
2. Turn on Keyboard Shortcuts (in Settings -> General)
3. Turn on Gmail Superstars in Labs (find it in Settings -> Labs)
4. Pick Superstars for message follow up priority (in General under Settings); I use the following:
   Yellow star - need to follow up with this message at some point
   Blue star – in the “next to follow up” queue (usually means today or sometime over the next few days)
   Red exclamation mark (a.k.a. Red Bang) – URGENT, deal with immediately
   Orange » (a.k.a. Orange Guillemet) – waiting for someone else to deal with
   
5. If you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, consider filtering the ones with low SNR into a single label directly (I label this “non-urgent” and it catches about 70% of all messages I receive so they never even hit the inbox) – a handy way to do this is to open a message sent to the mailing list and select “Filter messages like this”
   
   Filter tip: make sure you specify “-your-email-address” in the To: section for all filters if you want messages sent directly to you to always go to the inbox, regardless of other recipients. Otherwise messages sent to you directly and a filtered mailing list will be lost.
6. As seldom as possible*, open the top message in your inbox.
7. If it’s something you can deal with quickly or don’t care about, hit the ‘[‘ key (archive-prev)
8. If it’s something that will take a lot of time to deal with, or you need to work on, star it with the appropriate star and hit the ‘[‘ key.
9. Repeat steps 7 – 8 until your inbox is empty.
10. Switch to the Star view, and work on the messages there, or other important stuff you have to work on from your task list – these are concrete things you have to deal with, and now you’re free to focus on them without the distraction of new messages arriving.
11. Every now and then (I do this every day or two), go through the “non-urgent” label (if you created filters) and skim through messages there and then remove the label from them. Most likely this won’t take long since the messages there are probably not that interesting or important.

* the frequency of checking your inbox depends on a) the amount of email you get, and b) whether your job depends on your timely responses to email messages (but this is usually not the case btw, even if you think so). I get a few hundred messages per day, and check my inbox 2 – 4 times per day (I vary the frequency depending on what is going on). The key is to minimize the amount of time you spend checking email, and part of that is not checking too often. I would guess that 1 – 2 times per day is perfect for most people.

I hope this helps dealing with the email overload. Btw, I think this is my first how-to blog post, exciting! :)

- Gummi