The Email System That Cleared My Inbox — and My Mind

What if your inbox worked for you, not against you?

Professional Life
Author

Me

Published

April 22, 2025

Do you spend hours each week triaging your email inbox, chasing follow-ups and losing track of important threads? If you’re still drowning in email, you’re doing it wrong!

Here’s the system that finally did it for me — and can for you too. It’s simple, powerful and keeps my inbox close to zero every day.

Step 1: Categorize Everything — No Exceptions

Start by reading your emails in your inbox one by one. Tag each with a category label. This helps you to track context. Apply multiple labels if necessary (that’s the power of using labels instead of folders: you gain flexibility and searchability without locking an email into a single place).

Use clear, consistent labels like:

  • Clients
  • Product
  • Data/Analytics
  • Compliance/Legal
  • People/HR
  • Meetings
  • Training/Development
  • System/Newsletter
  • Project - [Name] (e.g. Project - Mars)

Step 2: Apply the 2-Minute Rule

Borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this step is simple: if an email can be handled in under two minutes, do it immediately. Then archive it. No backlog. No delay.

This clears a surprising chunk of your inbox every day.

Step 3: Use Action Labels — Only When Needed

If it takes longer than two minutes, apply one of three action labels:

  • 01 Follow Up -> You need to respond or take action

  • 02 Waiting -> You’re waiting for someone else

  • 03 Read Through -> It’s for awareness, not action

This instantly tells your future self how to engage with the email.

Step 4: Run a Weekly Review

Spend some time at the end of each week clearing lingering emails with action labels.

Also, if you’re unsure which category label to apply to an email, you can create a label like “Temp/To Sort” and empty it every Friday during Weekly Review. Remember, ideally every email must fit into at least one category. If an email doesn’t fit, maybe broaden an existing category slightly. Only if you consistently get 10+ emails/month that truly don’t fit anywhere, create a new category label.

At the end, 95% of emails should fit your defined categories and maximum 5% can sit in “Temp/To Sort”, but it must be cleared weekly.

Don’t forget to declutter you categories every now and then: delete or merge any category label unused for 2–3 months.

Make It a Habit, Not a Headache

Remember to archive aggressively – if it’s done and labeled, it’s gone. Avoid “Miscellaneous” as a category label, it hides problems. And use your “Temp/To Sort”-label only as a temporary label, not a final destination.

Like this, you get zero inbox stress. You have every email clearly tagged by action and context. This gives you more mental space to focus on what matters. On top of it, you have a fully searchable archive that makes past work easy to retrieve.

This system isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters faster and cleaner.

Credits

This blog post was inspired by Jeff Su’s walkthrough Achieve INBOX ZERO. Check out his video where he works you through the setup for Microsoft Outlook and includes helpful examples.

The original inbox zero guy is Merlin Mann who popularized how to get your inbox to zero and shared strategies for dealing with high email volume back in 2006.

Other references: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Penguin Books.

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