Discover InboxPro Zero, the modern approach to email management, utilizing AI for efficient inbox organization.
Do you know the Inbox Zero philosophy? It was coined by Merlin Mann, an American writer who popularized the concept in the mid-2000s. In a famous article, he proposed an strategy to manage your inbox in a more effective way in order to reduce stress and accelerate productivity.
How Inbox Zero works?
It consists of getting your Inbox to zero when your workday ends, but it doesn’t mean that you have read or answered all the emails, but that you have sifted through those that were important (and needed to be answered) and sorted the rest.
The advantages are obvious, as said before, less stress and greater productivity because, at the end of the day, there are no unresolved issues.
The system works by creating tags like these:
- Action: emails you need to respond to.
- Awaiting: emails for which you are waiting for a reply.
- Read later: emails that contain useful information.
- Others: emails that can be archived, muted or deleted.
So that, every time an email comes in, you can focus on the ones you have to reply to and the rest will be managed at a later time.
Does Inbox Zero philosophy still work in 2023?
But the question is: does Inbox Zero philosophy still work in the 2020s? Situation has changed (a lot), we all have multiple inboxes, we have to manage notifications not only by email but from social media and they are all important.
So, is it posible to maintain a zero inbox? In a more recent article, Merlin Mann itself has written that probably we cannot achieve Inbox Zero anymore, but still we can manage the multiple inboxes in a smarter way.
How? By following these principles:
- Accept that almost everything in your life is an inbox: part from the assumption that this is unmanageable. That’s it.
- Set times to read email: if you want to be productive never check your email constantly, set specific times to read and respond instead.
- Switch off: allow yourself to disconnect from email from time to time, otherwise you will get mad.
I don’t know you but I think that these principles are a little bit vagues. Ok, there are easy to understand but difficult to get them to practice because:
- Switching off means that when you get back to your inbox you’ll have a bigger pile of emails waiting for you.
- Setting times not always is possible if you are waiting for a colleague or even your boss to send you some information.
- And accepting that you can’t manage all the inboxes means that you are defeated from the beginning.
We, at InboxPro, suggest other approach to work with email by incorporating the new tools that provides AI an automation. We call it InboxPro Zero!
InboxPro Zero email management system
- Action: use the “Summarize” tool and “Templates” with ready-to-use answers to the most common questions to reply as quickly as possible.
- Awaiting: use InboxPro’s “Follow-ups” tool to automate the follow-up chain of emails.
- Read later: use “Snooze” to resend the email and have an automatic reminder.
- Others: if it doesn’t interest you, don’t think about it, delete it.
Give it a chance and let me know if you like this system. Try InboxPro here.
Have a nice and productive day!
