Conrey is for Closers

For two weeks now I’ve been experimenting with my Gmail filters to get a trueer handle on my email.   The quick run down for anyone who missed the original post is that I turned off all of the auto-archive filters so that I had to manually deal with my email.    After two weeks here’s what I’ve found:

1. Other than mailing lists this would be an easy practice to follow 100% of the time.   Most of my email requires very little actual effort to skim, tag and archive.   Even if I go a whole day without checking my email its only a small pain in the ass the next time I do check my email.   Because I’m constantly on my mail browsers while at work, its not usually an issue
2. GMail’s spam filter is awesome.   This isn’t news, but wow does it save me headaches.
3. Most of my mailing lists are more noise than signal.   I’ve unsubscribed from mailing lists that I realized I wasn’t getting any value from.   I would likely have kept them coming to waste my time other than this.

I expect to tweak this a bit and have some of the mailing lists auto archived just to delay my need to filter them, but this experiment has worked out well for my needs.   I’ve not missed any important or moderately important email in the last two weeks and don’t feel any more stressed about getting to inbox zero than I did before.

I’m a filter whore with Gmail.   Everything gets a tag, usually auto archived away to its folder where I can promptly ignore it.   After joining the Inbox Zero mindset, I started to think that having things auto archived from Gmail’s inbox didn’t really count.   I wasn’t acting on these messages anyway, and often missed emails entirely.

So today starts a new experiment:   I turned off the “Archive It (Skip the Inbox)” button on all of the rules in my personal Gmail account so that everything hits my inbox now and I have to manually archive them away.    My thought process is that at least this way I have to actively scan the headlines before deciding whether or not to ignore them.   This will also make Inbox Zero a true Zero, where all of my incoming bits are managed.    I’ll try this for a week or so and report back as to my progress.