Inbox 33k

I always looked at “Inbox Zero” approach with a mixed feeling: I find it extremely useful to think about action-based email handling but was never sold on the importance of getting your inbox to zero.

Or perhaps I’ve never been able to apply that strategy completely. With the years, and more so after starting to use gmail in late 2004, I’ve been using my inbox as a flow-based interface to the river of conversations coming to me.

I regularly check for new emails, looking at just the first page of the inbox (sometimes just the first 10 emails), if something needs my immediate attention I read it and act on it (replying or applying the TODO label). Colored labels applyed by  filters help me focus my attention on any serious item (e.g. the exceptions raised from my rails apps are marked in dark red ).

I have also the habit of subscribing to many mailing lists (at least one for each of the tools I use regularly), and usually make sure those emails are properly labeled and go also on the inbox (unless the ML is really heavy or if it’s something I don’t care currently).

For the rest I just had to stop worrying about losing some important message and the river-of-emails kind of managed itself, if there’s some important topic I miss (to act upon) it will just re-pop itself on the top: the people will resend the email, the mailing list thread will receive more messages, … (If it doesn’t re-gain the top spot it was probably not that important).

I specially like default format for the message list which got rid of the three pane layout and automatically organized email threads by reverse chronological order while showing not only the subject but also the first few words of the body (moreover it doesn’t sweat if you throw 10′s of thousands of emails). This is just one example of the reasons making gmail just about perfect for doing email my way (or perhaps it’s just a case of a tool that shapes the habit of its user :-) )

P.S. This is something that I wanted to put down for a while, but just got around after reading this article, which worked as a ping popping up on top of my river-of-news reader :)