How to Achieve Inbox Zero

Now that you've downloaded our handy spring cleaning checklist, we're going to dive into the first category: your email inbox.

We all dream about the glorious and lofty goal of "inbox zero," but we're here to show you that this seemingly-unattainable goal is closer than you think! Here's how:

1. Take stock of your inbox. When you open your inbox, what do you see? A notification for 1,000 unread emails? More folders than you know what to do with? With a quick look at what's happening in your inbox, you can now decide what area needs the most help.
   
   
2. Go through your saved messages. We're all guilty of over-saving emails, so now it's time to delete those old messages that never proved to be helpful after you initially opened them. Go through your folders one at a time, carefully deleting what seems to be irrelevant now. If you're selective about what really needs to stay, this step will definitely help lighten your load.
   
   
3. Tighten down those spam controls. If spam is overtaking your inbox, we have a quick solution for that: unroll.me! With unroll.me, the website will pull together every subscription that's coming into your inbox and will give you the choice to: (1) keep 'em coming, (2) unsubscribe, or (3) "roll them up" into a daily or weekly digest. Too simple.
   
   
4. Sort through that inbox! Without further adieu, it's time to make inbox zero happen. Start with your most recent email and head down the list. At this point, it would be helpful to develop some kind of system specific to your email provider. If you use MerusCase, sorting emails is particularly simple: when you're in a message, you can easily attach your emails to a case and remove them from your inbox. As another example, in Gmail, I would "star" emails that need a response, archive everything that needs to be saved and then, at the end, I would just "select all" and delete whatever is leftover.
5. Make friends with the "archive" button. If you use Gmail, you may or may not have noticed the "archive" button -- it looks like a little folder in the panel above an open email. Clicking the archive button will put an email out of sight, but it will always remain searchable in your inbox. What more could you ask for? Additionally, if you're using MerusCase, attaching emails to a case works as an "archive" function, which makes it easy to get resolved email clutter out of your inbox.
   
   
6. Come up with a new plan to tackle it all. This process will depend on your particular workflow, but the bottom line is that you need to come up with a technique to get everything moving through your inbox more quickly. For example, you might want to adopt a last-in-first-out strategy, in which you try to tackle new emails as soon as possible.

Now that you've worked your way through our 6 step inbox purging process, the most important thing to do is maintain it! What are some of your tried and true tips for keeping your sanity with a busy inbox? Let's discuss in the comments below! 

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post, where we'll hash out everything you can do to organize your mobile devices! Don't want to miss any posts? Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below!

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