Welcome Wednesday: "Inbox Zero" Champions Unite!

[#1]

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

This past weekend, I went into my wife office to chat about something and I was hit with mental anguish when I saw over 5000 unread emails. In her defense, most of those were system alerts only a small portion of which were actually important. This massive inbox of both read and unread messages didn’t seem to bother her at all.

My question for you this week:
How do you manage your inbox? Are you an “Inbox Zero” champion like myself, or do you let the emails roll in and deal with them as needed? Any funny or horror stories about missing something important in the email avalanche?

Personally, I try to keep things tidy, the only items that stay in the inbox are those that I have follow up actions to take. At times, this can get rather lengthy especially when some of those items I’m not expected to follow up on immediately.

Let me know in the comments below!

Have a great rest of the week everyone!

[Stephen_Lugton]

I try and have my inbox clean of unread emails at least once a week; since we mostly use Teams chat I keep that clean of unread chats daily, so if it's on an email it's less important.

I do have a number of rules set up to categorise emails into folders, mostly ones I'll never actually read but need to have available in case of future audit; since 7th October when we all got new email accounts I've racked up 2000+ unread emails in folders.  Most of those relate to updates on specific JSM work items for which we may be required to prove that notifications were sent and when (it's all a regulated financial services thing)

[Andy Gladstone]

Folders, folders, folders - and routing rules!

I keep on top of the important work by using a very detailed filing system and over 50 rules for directing the traffic that comes in to my Inbox. Just for the Atlassian Community alone I have a folder with (14) subfolders!

[Urmo]

For me zero mailbox is not something what I have to have. Things what have to do in Atlassian. I create ticket into Jira and another emails are nice to have. Some are just know thing and another are automation errors and there is more emails from where will be come something to build into Atlassian Cloud.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I take care of my work email inbox every day pretty much, though emails that come in near the end of my day sometimes are left till the next morning. I, however, get a manageable number of emails—I recently took a week off and had only 96 new emails when I returned.

My personal email is a completely different story—it may rival your wife's number, @Jimmy Seddon. After working at a computer all day, the last thing I want to do when I'm done working is sit down at my personal computer and look at email. I keep on top of recent stuff with my phone (sort of, when I think to look at it), but I may have unread email from a year ago if I open Outlook on my desktop. Periodically, I sort it by sender and delete swathes of it that way, since I don't really need adverts about sales that are long over or old newsletters from airlines and such. Thanks for this reminder that it's probably time to do this again… maybe this weekend…if I think of it.

[Amanda Barber]

Using Gmail helps keep my personal email somewhat manageable, but with all the school emails, I tend to have somewhere around 100 unread emails (requiring action or follow up). This is pretty stressful to me to have this many, tbh - ha! Thankfully, I don't get that scary number on my home screen like I would with an iPhone/iMail!

At work, I keep my inbox tidy and tend to be at zero most days.