A New Year’s resolution you can keep: A clean inbox

Each new year, people promise themselves that they will get better organized, read more, lose weight, be kinder, and tackle a host of other resolutions they may or may not keep. Here’s one resolution you can accomplish: It’s called Inbox Zero, and it will make you more productive with email — that tool you use all the time.

Inbox Zero encourages people to keep their inboxes clean and clutter-free by making sure it is emptied daily. It’s a concept developed and promoted by Merlin Mann, an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. I don’t know about you, but I have about 10,000 messages in my inbox and could probably benefit from a new method or system that would help me deal with all of that mail flow.

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The Inbox Zero idea is to use folders, filters, and focus to get your mail better organized. A big key to this is to delete junk mail like mad rather than letting it sit in your inbox. Even beyond the stuff our spam filter catches, we all get tons of junk mail each day. The only way to keep it from crowding out your real email is to adamantly delete the junk, do your best to unsubscribe to those emails you no longer read, and divert those borderline emails you might or might not read into a folder using filters.

The first part of the Inbox Zero process begins with what Mann calls a DMZ: You create a new folder called DMZ and move everything you currently have in your inbox into that folder. That way, you start with a zeroed-out inbox.

Your next step is to create folders to which you can filter content. Some people go with a folder structure that relates to timeframes of when they need to get to a matter (today, tomorrow, next week, and so on), and others categorize emails by subject (newsletters, friends, business); some people use a combination of approaches. It’s a process, not a one-time thing; it will take a little while to cultivate the right folder set for your needs.

Mann recommends a few additional activities to assist with email overload syndrome, including altering your email check-in schedule so that you aren’t constantly interrupted by new email and “living in your inbox.”

Most of all, Mann encourages lots of deletion. He says to ask yourself the question: What does this message mean to me and why do I care? If you cannot answer that question, delete the email. If a message does mean something to you, determine what action is required on your part (read and file, read and respond, and so on) — then do it. He encourages people to focus on the action that needs to be taken to respond to messages quickly (perhaps using templates for those short, repetitive responses) so that emails don’t linger and draw you back later.

With 10,000 messages in my own inbox — and you’re probably in the same shape — there’s no way I can triage all that email in one sitting. Instead, I’m moving all messages into the DMZ folder and will go through its contents, starting with the oldest notes, in 10-minute chunks. As I review and delete, I’ll also figure out a folder structure for the emails I want to keep. Once I’m confortable with that setup, I’ll create filters to sort emails into the relevant folders where possible. That’ll keep future emails from littering my clean inbox.

That’s my goal for 2013: a zero inbox. But I have a few other suggestions that you can use to improve your productivity in 2013:

• Organize your desktop. Consider a tool like Stardock Fences that helps you organize your desktop icons into a cleaner, more organized place.
• Run leaner by eliminating duplicate data. Of the many tools to dedupe your PC’s files, I like Easy Duplicate Finder. This tool will help you identify the redundant copies of your documents, photos, songs, videos, and so forth and determine what you would like to do with them. You’ll save not just disk space but the time and hassle of figuring out which file is what when you’re in a crunch.
• Back up your PC to the cloud. Everyone should back up their PCs’ data. It’s best to do so in the cloud, so an on-premise disaster (big or small) at home or work doesn’t threaten your backup copy as well, a risk with local backups. There are many cloud backup offerings to choose from.

Happy New Year — and best wishes for fulfilling your resolutions!

This story, “A New Year’s resolution you can keep: A clean inbox,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.