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.

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.