Inbox Zen

Something I've been following for a while: the inbox zero principle. It's quite simple: always have an empty inbox. When you check your mail categorize each item until the inbox is empty. You can either:

• Delete
• Delegate
• Respond
  
• Defer
• Do

The great advantage of this is: less worrying, more doing. Every time you see the rising queue in your mailbox you get demotivated by the amount of work left. If you handle everything you can right away and schedule everything else you save time you can spend on other things!

One other thing I particulary like is having a 'waiting for' folder. Here I move all the mail I have send that I'm expecting a reply to. This way there's no more need to remember if I received a reply. Once a day or so I check my 'waiting for' and send a reminder to people if I think they're taking too long. It's amazing how many people (sorry to say, especially managers) fail to reply to an explicit question in a mail.

Check out this great talk about inbox zero by Merlin Mann. He writes 47 folders and also co-hosts the hilarious podcast You Look Nice Today.