An inbox, in any form, isn’t meant to hold things forever, it’s designed to be the first place an item goes before getting sorted, or taking action against; Like deleting or throwing out the item. This same approach is the most effective and efficient way of using email.

First off, the way I handle email is only going to work for me, I’m just going to outline how I do things to give you ideas how to keep your inbox clear.

Second, since I own jordanhackworth.com I have all emails sent to that domain land in one email account, and any time I have to sign up for something I use the name of the service @jordanhackworth.com, for facebook I use facebook@jordanhackworth.com. Since I do this, it’s very simple to automatically label incoming messages and have them skip the inbox. For facebook messages, I have a label setup that labels everything to: facebook@jordanhackworth.com as ‘Facebook’ and skip the inbox. If you don’t own your domain, but use gmail, you can do this: somebody+facebook@gmail.com. Anything after the plus sign is ignored by gmail and sent to the address before the plus sign, in this case ’somebody.’ From there you can filter it messages the same way I do, although some websites don’t like the plus sign in an email address.

In gmail, I have various labels set up, for different types of common email types I receive. If I’m working on a project, I create a label for it. For instance, all emails I receive about www.daytonchristianchurch.com go into a ‘Church’ label. Labeling these things right off the bat will allow me to come back and find the info I need very quickly and easily. If it’s something that I need to take action on, like adding new content to the site, I immediately put it into Things, my GTD program. If you have any type of TODO list, I suggest that you would add the action right then. If you don’t use any type of TODO or GTD list, I would suggest that you star the email (if you use gmail) and later remove the star when you’ve completed the action.

Next, I have three labels for when I buy things online, ‘Sales,’ ‘Shipping,’ and ‘Delivered.’ They should be self explanatory, when I buy something I stick the invoice into my ‘Sales’ label and remove it from the inbox, later on when I get a shipping tracking number I’ll add it to ‘Shipping’ and finally when I receive the item it will go into ‘Delivered.’ This is especially handy when you buy something and it gets lost in shipping, and you forget about it; (It’s happened to me) You can just look at ‘Shipped’ and see that it hasn’t delivered yet.

I have a ‘Money’ label for anything that comes in from my bank or from Mint.com. These are automatically sorted into that label.

I have a ‘Pictures’ label for when people send pictures to me, I also take the pictures out of the email and stick them in iPhoto right away.

Next, I have ‘Review’ and ‘Respond’ labels. Any time I get something in my inbox that I have to look at more before I can label it anything else, I’ll stick it in review and take it out of the inbox. If I’ve read it but need to respond, it goes into the ‘Respond’ label. I tend to batch my responses instead of doing one here and one there, unless my response is time sensitive.

Everything else is labels for specific websites, such as Voice Mail for any voice mail that come in from Grand Central, and it’s automatically labeled as well. With anything that doesn’t need to be labeled, I’ll archive it, and if it’s something that I don’t need any longer I’ll trash it.

If you’re interested in learning more about this, I recommend 43 Folders’ Inbox Zero: http://www.43folders.com/izero

If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to leave a comment.