Wondering how to quickly liberate content from your inbox and slip loose the bonds of email? Or maybe you need some tips on how to manage hundreds of emails flowing into your inbox each day? Learn some tips and tricks from a veteran Inbox Zero user. We will also explore adds-ons that help you keep better track of your emails.

People will look over my shoulder when I’m checking my email and, with wonder in their voices, ask, “How is it that you have so few emails?” Achieving Inbox Zero is a personal goal of mine. I loathe clutter, both in my office space and in my email inbox.

Some statistics to keep in mind:

• The average person spends 28% of the work week reading and responding to emails.
• This equates to 13 hours a week, and 650 hours a year.
• Consider how productive you could be if you had a few extra hours every week to focus on the projects that really matter.
• 59% of Americans say that they check their emails outside of office hours. Check out Source article

Set yourself up with a free Microsoft account.

It will allow you to create a OneDrive (cloud storage) virtual space where you can store your OneNote notebooks.

Start the process at login.microsoftonline.com

• Sort all your email in your inbox into Action, Follow-Up, and Someday.
• Anything else, including emails you deal with, go into Gmail’s built-in archive (a.k.a. All Email).
• If using Gmail, rely on their search tools to quickly find emails in your archive or elsewhere. It’s worth looking at this chart of Gmail search operators. My favorites include:
  • to:
  • from:
  • has:attachment
  • is:unread
  • after:, before:, newer: with each colon followed by the date in question
  • subject: to find words in the subject line

Astro

A relative newcomer to email, Astro features a Mac OS and iOS app. It enjoys an artificial intelligence (AI) that can help you manage your email (with Slack and Alexa support, scheduled emails, snooze emails). After using it for a week, I must confess that it works quite well. With it, I’ve managed to maintain inbox zero for my priority emails.

You can add very important people (VIPs) so that they end up in your priority inbox. All others, such as newsletters, are shuttled to the “Other” category. I find the Slack integration, which allows you to read your email in an Astrobot channel, to be a time-saver.

Reading my email in Slack, I’m able to archive, delete, or otherwise dispose of it from my Slack client, whether on my mobile or laptop. Astro also support multiple account types, such as Gmail, Microsoft Outlook/Office365, and others.

Sort D

SortD provides some amazing tools for organizing and managing your email. Some of its primary features include a multi-column layout for your Gmail (as shown above), adjust list names, and drag-and-drop to reorder the content of each column or across columns. There are many other features, but you may want to try it out.

Did you know you can setup different Gmail accounts, one per profile? This is great if you Windows/Mac computer and you have a work/personal account you have to deal with.

When done, you will have one Chrome browser shortcut on your desktop that will open up a different gmail account. What a time-saver!

Privacy

1. Virtru Email Encryption - Encrypt email messages you send to anyone (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.)
2. SecureGmail - Encrypt any gmail messages you send to others with gmail (attachments aren't encrypted).
3. Mailvelope - Another way to encrypt email using public/private key encryption