Inbox Zero: I was shooting for it all along!
With all of the beneftis bestowed upon us by modern email systems such as Gmail, I get really annoyed by people who have inboxes overflowing with email messages. So, in protest, I play this little game with myself where I try to keep my inbox as empty as possible by dealing with messages as soon as I can and filing away those messages which I’ll need for later. Seeing an empty Gmail inbox advising me to check the news on Google Reader makes me feel very good.
Just the other day, I found this productivity theory called Inbox Zero created by Merlin Mann who is a major-leage GTD fanboy. The whole premise is that if there are emails remainging in your inbox, it represents that which you haven’t dealt with yet. I watched the Google Tech Talk video which was seriously excellent and the presentation available on slideshare is useful as well.
I’ve been doing this for a while - see http://www.sungate.co.uk/?p=294 (plus my earlier post which it links to).
The single most helpful technique that I’ve found is to switch off all email notifications. For some people this is really hard to do, but it is worth it - especially for me at work: too many distractions otherwise.
Good luck with this.