Why your inbox should not be an archive

Managing hundreds of emails daily as a CEO should be overwhelming. It's not. Here's my system that saves me hours weekly: The Setup: Smart Inbox Architecture Instead of one chaotic inbox, I run five purpose-built streams: Needs Action - requires my response Awaiting Reply - tracking delegated tasks Read Later - FYI content for downtime Remember This - reference material Delegated - team ownership items Each lives as a separate Gmail label with its own filtered view. No email touches my main inbox for more than seconds. The Automation: AI-Powered Triage I built a simple n8n workflow that: * Reads incoming email instantly * AI categorizes based on content/sender/context * Applies appropriate label * Archives from main inbox * Zero manual sorting. Zero decision fatigue. The Execution: Context Batching Gmail's "Stay in Label" feature is gold. For example, when processing Read Later emails, I stay locked in that view—read, delete, next. No context switching. No re-reading the same email 3x wondering what to do with it. Result: What used to take 90 minutes now takes 5 or 10. This isn't about having a clean inbox for aesthetics. It's about: * Never missing critical customer issues * Faster response times on strategic decisions * Actually disconnecting after hours (everything's already triaged) * Team gets faster feedback because I'm not drowning Your inbox shouldn't be a to-do list. It should be a routing system. Full technical breakdown here on setting up multiple inboxes: https://lnkd.in/g4Th_b3w

Haunted by 10,247 unread emails in your inbox? It's okay to declare Email Bankruptcy. At least for your personal email. By Email Bankruptcy, I mean just select all the emails in your personal inbox—ALL of them—and hit Archive. Since you're archiving the email and not deleting anything, any message you might need in the future will be there whenever you need it. But now you can start from scratch with a peaceful, empty inbox. Yes, it's a temporary solution. But declaring Email Bankruptcy and giving yourself a clean slate is better than beating yourself up every time you open your inbox. I did it, and nothing bad happened. Yes, I later found emails people had sent me that I hadn't responded to. But guess what? Keeping those emails unread in my inbox like pets didn't result in me responding to those emails either! You already work 8-12 hours a day at your regular job. Or you spend hours every day looking for your next job. Maybe you're like my clients at The Art of Applying, and you're applying to grad school. You've signed up for a dozen schools' email lists. You're feeling overwhelmed by all the emails the schools send about upcoming events and all the emails they send with student profile highlights (emails that make you feel even more anxious about measuring up). Think of it this way... If you are expecting important emails in your future—whether that's an update on a job application or a status update on your grad school application—that email wasn't sent to you in the past. That email is on its way to you, and you want to make sure you don't miss it. So you can go ahead and just let the past go. Say bye-bye to those 10,247 emails mocking you every time you log in. And guess what? You are doing enough. You respond to enough people outside of work. You aren't going to become irrelevant if you don't read every single personal email you receive. You aren't being wildly irresponsible by declaring Email Bankruptcy—at least not any more wildly irresponsible than just leaving the 10,247 emails unread. Give yourself some space. Let's Discuss: While I enjoy a semi-annual archive session, I know there are a lot of tools out there that could help folks. Let's share tips in the comments! Or if you just want to share that you needed permission to declare Email Bankruptcy, I'd love to hear about that too. Here's to clearing up mental and digital space in our lives! ♥️

Had a conversation about being a zero-inboxer, and thought I'd share my strategies for maintaining a "zero" inbox. 1. "Zero" means non-scrollable inbox. There's no way I'll ever have a truly empty inbox. 2. Treat emails left in the inbox as a todo list. These should be relatively quick hit items that you can get to when you have a bit of free time. 3. If something will take longer than 15 minutes, schedule a blocker on your calendar with the title of the email, and archive the email. When the calendar item comes up, go find the email, and complete the task. (Some systems will let you turn emails into calendar items - do that if possible.) 4. Don't end the day with a scrollable inbox. If it's still scrollable, make calendar items and archive. 5. Once it's done, archive it (don't delete). Be done with it. Let the archive be your knowledge base. 6. Create rules to tuck away any emails which are things you may need to reference later but aren't actually important on a day-to-day basis (like many emails from DLs). 7. Minimal folders. Really. I find folders just make it harder to find emails, and then I need to make decisions on which folder I should put an item into. I used to do "virtual" folders (ones based on search), but found they didn't really help. Which leads me to... 8. Become good at search. It's much easier to craft a search string than it is to poke around at which folder might have an email. 9. Archive old emails after returning from a break lasting longer than a week. (I've talked about this in the past) 10. Don't be afraid to declare email bankruptcy. If you have 1,500 emails in your inbox, it's time to admit you're never going to get to them. Archive them and start fresh. You'll literally never dig out of a hole like that. If it's really important, they'll email again. And if they haven't, and it's been more than 3 weeks, I think everyone has already admitted the task involved in the email (even if it's just replying) isn't happening and has moved on.