It has been a while since my last article about how Gmail works and in the meantime I have instructed another 500 Googlers with the best practices on how to keep your inbox empty when using Gmail.

In this article I will go deeper into the rules and principles on how to keep your inbox empty. A lot of what I discuss here comes from many different sources and I have tested these points throughly myself and they work for me. That said, these rules and principles may not work 100% in the same way for you, so be sure to experiment, use this as a guide and find out what does works for you.

Please note that the following rules and principles can be applied to any email program and are not limited to Gmail only.

Five rules to keep your inbox empty

In order to keep your inbox empty you will need to apply these five simple rules to your day to day email activities:

1. If you don’t need to read it now, it shouldn’t be in your inbox!

I know this is a hard one for a lot of people. But you should really get these emails out of your inbox. Remember that your inbox is supposed to be empty! And if not, they are supposed to hold nothing but truly unread messages. If you are still in doubt, try comparing your email inbox with your regular mailbox at home (you know, the one where the postman drops in your bills, etc) and ask yourself if you let your old mail also accumulate in this mailbox? If you empty it, as most people would, why don’t you do the same with your email inbox? The empty-inbox principle is the same for both mailboxes.

2. If you have already responded to it, it shouldn’t be in your inbox!

If you want to remember for yourself that you need to follow up with someone, make sure to put this on your to-do list. If you are waiting for a response, just keep in mind that when the other person responds, the email will automatically pop back up in your mailbox. No need to clutter your inbox up with already read emails.

3. If it comes from a known source (e.g. some person, retailer or mailing list that sends you mail more often than once every few months) it should be labeled automatically and preferably skip your inbox.

This particular rule seems to be hard for a lot of people. I normally translate this rule into “if the email has not been send to you personally, meaning if the email does not have your email address in the TO or CC field, then the email should (preferably) skip your inbox”. Of course this does not only cover email notifications you may receive from services like Twitter or Facebook, but from any known source (newsletters, reminders, etc).

Just to elaborate on this a little bit more, I have seen way too many inboxes with more than 80.000 (yes, eighty thousand!) emails coming from a lot of different sources, of which most were coming from known sources and were not aimed to the persons specifically but rather to a mailing list or something similar. If you are one of these persons, let me ask you: If you have more than 100 emails in your inbox, do you ever check what was in email 72 or 181 or 1.006 or 41.849? Probably not! Most people do not check these so I urge to ask yourself why have these emails cluttering up your inbox?

4. No one needs to look at their inbox more than three times a day, preferably even less.

Different time management books and resources recommend to only look at your email once or twice a day maximum. Some even state once per week. The most recommended times to look at your email would be just before 12pm (because this is just before lunch and you will want to keep it short) and at 4pm (so you can deal with any urgent issues that still need to be dealt with that day, before going home). I do want to highlight another advantage of not checking your email earlier than just before 12pm, ad that is that you will have several hours in the morning in which you can be very productive and really get things done. Often to-do items you receive overnight through email are tasks that will keep you busy in an unproductive way. By not checking your email before 12pm, you can focus and first get the most important tasks of the day done. After that you can deal with whatever else is coming your way through email. On a personal note, I noticed this really works much better for me.

5. Re-factor constantly and mercilessly.

For example, every time an email slips through your filters, make sure to update it. Once in a while see if you can not reduce the number of labels and join several labels together into one, etc.

A few key principles

In addition to these simple rules, there are a few but very important principles to keep in mind:

1. Your inbox is not a to-do list and you are better off using Google Tasks or Google Calendar to keep track of the things you need to do. Also just an ordinary pen and paper will be better as you to-do list than any cluttered inbox.

2. Email is just another medium. If something is really urgent, email may not be the best medium to deliver this urgent content. Remember you also have other means like calling someone, pinging them through a chat client like Google Talk or just walk up to them and talk to them face-to-face. For example, to set the right expectations to the people with whom I communicate over email I have included the following line into my signature: “I check my mail 2 times per day…if you need me urgently, stop by my desk, ping or call me”. This solves most issues with people reporting that I don’t respond within a few minutes or hours after they emailed me (including my managers). In addition, problems and inquiries get a chance to be sorted by themselves without me having to step in to solve it.

3. Keep each email you write short (no matter if you are starting or responding to an email thread). For example, for a long time I was actively trying to keep my email responses to five sentences or less (from the greeting to the signature). I even had several post-it notes with the number five on all my desktop screens, to remind me. Whenever my response was in danger of becoming longer than five sentences, I asked myself: why? It turned out that most of the time I was trying to explain something to someone (like a work flow process, summarizing decisions taken at meetings, etc) and I then asked myself: what if I note this down somewhere (like Google Docs or Google Sites) so I can share it with everyone else in the organization. In this way I did not have to worry about sending multiple emails on this same subject on the future, I created documentation which now enabled others to also contribute too and best of all, my emails were still short (most of the time just one line with a link to the resource). Nowadays most of my emails are automatically short and cost me minimal time to write them. If you like this idea, you should check out these sites: five.sentenc.es, four.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es and two.sentenc.es.

4. Last but not least, you should aim at processing your emails to an empty inbox. You can do this by asking yourself what action you need to take with each email you receive. In the most simplistic way, emails can be converted into the following actions: archive or mark as read, delegate (forward it to someone more suited to handle the email), respond to/do it now (this sums up the two minute rule, which states that if you can do it within two minutes you should just do it straight away because noting it down in a to-do list takes longer) and finally defer (plan it onto your to-do list or into your calendar).

Once you try the rules and principles mentioned above and think about what works for you, you will be on your way of keeping your inbox empty. Please do share your thoughts on these rules and principles in the comments below and let us know what works for you and if I missed anything.

P.S. In my next “keeping you inbox empty”-article I will go into more depth on how to create the right labels in Gmail and how to create/use filters in Gmail.

Since the latest release of Google App Engine SDK, Django 1.0 is officially supported by Google App Engine and in the article Unleash Django with app-engine-patch the advantages of using App Engine Patch (which allows you to use more Django functionality on Google App Engine) are well described. However the documentation of App Engine Patch is lacking some detailed description on how to set this up this locally. So I decided to write this small tutorial, in which I will guide you setting up Google App Engine SDK with App Engine Patch on an Ubuntu machine.

Why Ubuntu and not Windows?

For me this is a clear-cut choice. I have stepped away from Windows about a year ago after I tried to use Windows Vista Business edition for 8 months and was almost ready to throw the computer out of the building. I have used Windows most of the last 15 years I have been working on computers but in the last few years I saw that Linux is finally able to replace most, if not all, functionalities I require/need from an operating system. And since I also like the open source movement, for me switching to Linux made sense.

First the Debian distribution was my preferred choice but in the last 2 years Ubuntu has become really user friendly (offering a great user interface to Linux and frequent updates). In addition Linux operating system are especially great if you need a web development environment (although it may be challenging at times with the more graphical aspects of web development, like Flash or SilverLight). If you haven’t done recently already, I recommend you to give Linux a try! Please note that most of the steps described below can be applied to most other Linux distributions as well.

Before we start…

What you will need on Ubuntu for this tutorial are:

• A Terminal (which you can find under ‘Main menu > Applications > Accessories > Terminal’)
• A Google App Engine account (apply)
• Google App Engine SDK, Python version (download)
• App Engine Patch (download)
• Python 2.5 (which is available in the Ubuntu repository)

That is basically it, no more is needed :)

Setting Up a Google App Engine Account

In order to be able to use Google App Engine, we need to set up a free account. If you haven’t done this yet I recommend you do so by going to http://appengine.google.com/ and sign in with your Google Account (you will need to create one if you don’t have one yet).

Once logged in, you have to option to ‘Create an Application’ (see button at the bottom of the page). Click the button to create an application and fill in the form. Please note that you can not change the name (Application Identifier) after you have chosen it, nor can you delete it. Also currently you can only create a maximum of 10 applications, so I recommend you create just one for testing purposes (e.g. username-test).

After you are have created the application feel free to browse a little bit through the online admin interface. This is where you will be able to monitor the performance of your application once it has gone live.

Setting up Google App Engine

We can set up Google App Engine in several different ways. Most of the set up requires you to just download the SDK and unzip it. However for App Engine Patch we want to do go one step further. We want to register it in our PATH so we can access it from anywhere else on the computer.

In order to do all of this, first download the Google App Engine SDK (you need to go for the Linux download!) and unzip it into your home directory (one of the ways you can do this is by right-clicking on the zip-file and click on ‘Extract here’).

Unzipping the SDK will create a new sub directory called google_appengine, with the SDK files in it. Note that if all user information is stored under /home/<your-username>/ then after unzipping the SDK should be accessible here:

/home/<your-username>/google_appengine/

in my case this would be:

/home/fili/google_appengine/

Now we want to make sure we all the files have the correct access rights. We could go very specific into detail here and give different file-types different access permissions or we could just do it simple. I choose for the later, so please open a terminal (you can find this in your main menu, under Applications and Accessories). Once you open the terminal you should be in your home directory, under your user account. To verify this, type: pwd. This will print out the current path you are in (see also the screenshot below).

Now type ls and verify that you have the sub directory google_appengine there.

To make sure the access permissions are correct type the following command:

chmod -R 750 ~/google_appengine/

This will set all the permissions to something we can access. Now we need to make sure we can actually access the SDK from anywhere. In order to do this we need to add the sub directory to the environment PATH. In your terminal type:

pico ~/.bashrc

Don’t worry if the file does not exist yet or if it is full of stuff. Once you have opened the file, find the first or second white-line, and add the following lines:

# set path
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/google_appengine
export PATH

Now close and save this by clicking Control-O (this will save the new lines) and Control-X (this will close the nano editor). After this you need to log out of your Ubuntu session and log in again.

After you logged out and in again, you can verify this all worked by opening another terminal and typing:

echo $PATH

This should print something similar to the screenshot below (note the /home/fili/google_appengine at the end of the line.

The hardest part has been done now ;)

Setting Up Python2.5

You probably already have Python installed on your machine but this may be the wrong version. In order to work with App Engine Patch and Google App Engine SDK we need to make sure we all use the same version of Python, for which Python 2.5 is currently the best choice.

You can see which version is primary set up on your computer by opening a terminal and type python2.5. You should then get a screen like this (Control-D or typing exit() will get you out of this screen again):

If you get an error message that Python can not be found, it means that it is not yet installed.

If you don’t have Python 2.5 installed, you will need to install it. Make sure you have an internet connection and type:

sudo apt-get update

This make sure you have the latest repository lists available. Then type this:

sudo apt-get install python2.5

Select ‘Yes’ if asked if you want to proceed and this will install Python version 2.5 on your machine. After this process has been completed, try typing again python2.5.

Setting Up App Engine Patch

We are going to set up the App Engine Patch on our Desktop, but you can put it anywhere else on the computer.

First download the latest version of App Engine Patch to your Desktop and unzip it (similar as how you unzipped the Google App Engine SDK). A new sub directory will be created called ‘app-engine-patch-sample’. You can rename this sub directory to the name of your application (in my case: ‘fili-test’).

Before we can do anything else we need to change a one small settings in app.yaml. Open a terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop/<your-application-name>/

For me this would translate to:

cd ~/Desktop/fili-test/

Now type:

pico app.yaml

Change the name on the first line to your application name and save the changes (Control-O) and exit the editor (Control-X):

Now your App Engine Patch example folder is associated with your Application Identifier. Now you can run the Google App Engine SDK with your App Engine Patch locally by typing (inside the fili-test subdirectory):

python2.5 manage.py runserver

This will start the local development server (Control-C will allow you to stop the development server again).

If you now open your browser on http://localhost:8000/ you can see the development server running:

That is it. You are done! Now you can start developing web applications using the powerful Django framework on Google App Engine. I recommend you to also browse through these resources about Django and Google App Engine:

• Google App Engine Articles
• Django (official homepage)
• Google App Engine SDK Getting Started Guide
• Google App Engine Documentation (Python)

If you noticed any inaccuracies/errors or you are missing any steps or are running into problems, do leave a comment below!

During my time at Google I have instructed more than 450 Googlers with best practices on how to keep your inbox empty while using Gmail. Especially in a company like Google, the possibility of information overload is something to keep in mind, be aware of and hopefully avoid. I will hereby, in a couple of articles on this website, share some of my experiences and teachings. In this article I will first discuss a few of the basic principles behind Gmail. In following articles I will discuss more in depth the best practices on how to keep that inbox empty.

One important note before we start: Everything you know, and may have experienced in other email programs or solutions, you need to forget for a moment!

Why so much focus on an empty inbox while using Gmail?

First of all, an empty inbox will save you time, give you overview of what you need to do and what is urgent (and more importantly, what is not urgent). Beyond that, it will most definitely give you a good feeling and a sense of completion!

Secondly, we at Google (and me personally) like to dogfood our own products, meaning we will use the same products as our users and experience the pain points they may experience. This allows us to improve and make an even better product. Lastly I believe that Gmail is a fantastic product that can really help you be more productive, as Gmail is designed to keep things simple. I hope that the following basic principles will illustrate this point.

Inbox as a folder does not exist!

So to start off, there are no folders in Gmail. Okay, there is one folder called All Mail . Now here comes the key point: In Gmail, the inbox is a label, it does not exist as a folder! The inbox is not physical place where files or emails are stored. All emails in Gmail are stored in the All Mail folder and everything else is basically a label.  Whenever you receive a new email in your inbox you are actually receiving this email in your All Mail folder and it was labeled as inbox. When you log into Gmail, by default you will load the inbox view and as such you see new incoming mail.

If this sounds confusing, please read the lines above again as this will help you better understand how Gmail works and why it is so powerful.

No tree structure of folders?

I often get the question ‘can I also create labels under other labels?’ And the answer to this is: No, and why would you want too? When you think of labels, think of these to be similar to post-it notes, you can apply as many as you like to an email or none at all. If this is still too confusing, try to think of labels as references, shortcuts or bookmarks. Knowing this, would you still want to apply post-it notes under other post-it (in a hierarchy/tree structure)? It is important to leave the idea of folders behind and experiment with labels.

How about Archiving in Gmail?

Yes, it is true that when you are in the inbox (or in another label view) you can hit a button or keyboard shortcut to archive emails. When you do this, you are basically only removing the label. So another word for archiving in Gmail is ‘unlabeling’ or ‘removing the label’. So keep in mind that by archiving an email from your inbox, you do not move the email, nor do you store it in any special way. You just (and only) remove the label inbox from that email.

Now that you understand that all emails are stored in the All Mail folder (and not in inbox) I hope you can see you do not need to be afraid of archiving your emails and, by doing so, to empty your inbox.

Conversations rule!

Instead of finding all the different replies on one particular email topic you have been discussing, Gmail introduced in 2004 a concept called conversations. In many ways (for the regular user) these can be compared to threads in forums, where one person replies to another and you see it all appear underneath each other (all replies grouped by topic). As a result, you always know what has been said before, what you have read and what the conversation is about within the same email view. Over time I have found that this is saving me a lot of time, as well as making my responses shorter and quicker. However  I am amazed that, after more than 5 years, none of the other major web mail services have copied the idea of conversations. You would think it should not be too hard to implement or at least experiment with. Anyway, moving on …

Find Emails by using Search!

The main functionality in Gmail is search. Search will become your new best friend in Gmail! Mainly because Gmail stores all your email in one folder and not everything has to be labeled, you use the search function to find that one email back again. Even when you click on a label, you are actually doing a search in Gmail (e.g. look at the search field after you click on a label). When you use search, it is good to know that there are a number of advanced search operators you can use to limit the results of your searches. I find myself often using two to three search operators to search through more than 50.000 of my emails. You can even save some of your frequently used searches using Gmail Labs (look for the ‘Quick Links‘ Labs item).

That is it for now. In a next article I will discuss some of the techniques you can use to keep your inbox empty.