20/04/2025
Are your emails overwhelming you?
Here's one of the easiest and simplest ways to organize your emails, a method I learned from an online course, called the Zero Inbox Method:
1- Archive all emails older than two weeks. This step alone can clean up more than 98% of your inbox if your email account is over five years old, based on personal experience. Most probably, you do not need an email older than two weeks, and even if you need it, you'll be able to find it through the search. Remember, we are just archiving not deleting.
2- Create a label called [Optional]. Its main function is to handle non-essential emails like newsletters. Personally, I don’t like unsubscribing from newsletters because they often contain learning resources and promotional offers I’m interested in. However, I don’t want them cluttering my inbox. (I’ll explain how to do this later.)
3- Whenever an email arrives, choose one of the following options:
A- Address it immediately if it’s something simple, then archive it.
B- Postpone it using the Snooze feature for later attention.
4- To send newsletters to the [Optional] label, you’ll need to create a Filter Rule. This will search for certain phrases in emails and automatically archive them, moving them to [Optional]. I’ll share a list of phrases I filter on, which effectively identifies most newsletters.
5- When I have free time, I check the [Optional] label for any headlines or offers that catch my attention. I often find useful things and am glad I didn’t unsubscribe.
Important notes:
*The above explanation mainly applies to Gmail, but it also works with Outlook, with slight differences in terminology.
*Remember, we’re talking about archiving, not deleting emails, so you can easily search for them later.
*From my experience, complicating and overusing labels is the main source of confusion. I used to have many labels, each with rules based on the sender, which caused me to miss important emails because I forgot to check certain labels (including several emails from a previous boss who once asked why I wasn’t responding).
*Let me know in the comments if you think a video explanation would be better.
