How I Deal With Work Email Using Zero Inbox

At work, I’ve had many co-workers comment in astonishment on the number of emails they see in my inbox. Why, you ask? Because it’s always empty.

I utilize a strategy called Zero Inbox (or Inbox Zero), which was created by Merlin Mann. Here’s the original presentation Merlin gave to Google back in 2007.

This process has made my email much easier to handle because it ensures that I process every message, making a decision on how to handle each one.

Rules

I do one of four actions with every message: reply to it, defer it, archive it, or delete it. Here are the basic rules that I follow.

• Every item must be processed until the entire inbox is empty.
• Not every email requires a reply, so the vast majority of email I receive in my work email box is deleted.
• If an email requires a response and can be handled in just a few minutes (three to five, for example), I will reply to it and get it out of the way. After I’ve sent the reply, the original is usually deleted, unless I have a reason to archive it. More on archiving later.
• If the email requires a response, but takes longer to handle than just a few minutes, it goes into a folder named Actionable. I’m deferring the email until later, after the entire inbox is processed or whenever is timely based on priorities.
• If I have an email that I should keep, for any reason, I put it in a folder named Archived. There’s no need for a folder structure. If I need to find an email, I can simply use desktop search which has been built into Mac OS X for many years now. Windows has it, too.

Getting Started

I started out by creating an email DMZ. I immediately took all emails in my inbox and moved them into one folder, and right away I felt a relief because my inbox was totally empty.

After migrating existing mail to the DMZ, I immediately implemented my zero inbox strategy on all new emails that arrived. Doing this helped get me in the habit right away. Not long thereafter, I took the time to go through all of the emails that I moved and processed every single one of them. While I ended up deleting the vast majority, I found several that I forgot about which required action on my part.

Conclusions

After adopting this system, I found that I didn’t need to keep the amount of email in my entire email account as I previously through. I didn’t realize the burden I was putting on myself by keeping all of that data around, and I’m sure you will realize that, too, if you were to implement your own strategy.

I Don’t Care About iPhone Data Plan Changes

I see a lot of iPhone users with their panties in knots over this one.  According to news articles I’ve read this morning, AT&T will be moving away from the unlimited data plan on the iPhone to one that is capped at 2 GB of data transferred per month, but with lower pricing.

Being concerned that I’ll end up with a crap-ton of overages when I upgrade to the new iPhone coming out this month, I looked up my usage.  Turns out that the most I’ve used in the last six months is 350 MB.  That’s about 17% of the total allowable cap, so I should be just fine, as far as I’m concerned.

A lot of people feel cheated by AT&T, but I don’t agree.  They’re not going to charge the same amount of money for it.  In fact, your cell phone bill is going to go down as a result.  I’m totally speculating here, but I would guess that 95% of all iPhone users are well under that 2 GB cap, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s much higher in reality.

Mint.com vs. Quicken 2009

I’ve recently come to the realization that the pretense of being a Quicken user is just a waste of time.  I haven’t updated anything in it for months; it’s tedious and just an overall pain in the ass.

Instead, I’ve been actively using Mint.com.  It’s freakin’ awesome!  It’s able to connect up all of my important accounts: checking, online savings, auto loan, 401k, student loans, etc.  They’ll even let you track the value of your important assets like your car and home.

There are two exceptions, unfortunately: I’m not able to track my two Health Savings Accounts.  It’s not a big deal, really, because I rarely use either account, but it’s worth nothing that they’re supposed to contribute to my overall net worth.

So, why do I like Mint.com so much?  Here are some of my reasons.

• Mint.com automatically pulls data from many more sources than Quicken 2009, without me having to go to the financial institution’s web site and download the data myself for importation into Quicken.
• It’s much, much, much simpler to use.  It provides my net worth and let’s me see how I’m spending my money with pretty graphs and stuff.
• Mint.com has an iPhone application, allowing me to see my current balances and transactions from anywhere at any time.  This is huge.
• It’s free, for now, but I would definitely pay for it.

It’s really a good financial tool for those of us who are too lazy to dick around with Quicken, and the ability to check my accounts on my mobile device is a really big deal for me, especially when I’m traveling.

So, with all that being said, I don’t intent on buying another version of Quicken again.

Quicken Mac 2007 is Dead, Long Live Quicken 2008 for Windows

Quicken Mac 2007 sucks!

I’ve switched to using Quicken 2008 (for Windows) which I’m using on Windows XP running VMware Fusion.

I wish I could get a refund.

Google Apps Mail Hosting

I’ve migrated the email hosting for netmonkey.net over to Google Apps recently.

For those of you who aren’t in the know, this is Google’s offering of Gmail for domains. Since they offer a basic package at no charge with IMAP support and lots of storage, it made sense to switch over to them from Tuffmail. It’s just me and my mother using netmonkey.net, so I don’t see the point in paying someone for something I can get for free (and still keep my domain).

(By the way, I have nothing bad to say about Tuffmail because they’ve been an extremely reliable hosting company for the past three years, but it is time for me to move on.)

Anyway, the only difficult part of the migration was the migration itself.

• DNS hosting for all of my domains, including netmonkey.net, was handled by Tuffmail at no cost. Since I’m canceling my service, I had to move to a new provider. Fortunately, GoDaddy also offers free DNS services, so it seemed like the logical choice, for now.
• I have a lot of email! I did a manual migration using Apple Mail which worked just fine, but it look quite some time to complete. Ideally, I would have used a migration script, but I didn’t feel like doing it.

I had to get used to the way that Gmail handles its IMAP folder structure, but so far I don’t have any complaints. It works exactly as it should.