The Journalist’s Guide to Inbox Zero

The secret ingredient is procrastination.

The internet is full of tech dudes praising the wonders of “inbox zero,” testifying that keeping their email clutter-free cleared up their skin and landed them a date with the girl of their dreams. For journalists, it’s hard not to resent this: One imagines they live in a world where they can go on 10-day silent retreats without returning to an inbox full of angry editors and missed opportunities, where an “Out of office” reply doesn’t mean “Don’t hire me.” Rather than questions about work that will still be there in two days and the occasional note about today’s lunch options, journalists wade through seas of misguided press releases mingling with bar mitzvah evites to find those precious assignment emails.

As a freelance journalist, I, too, practice inbox zero (realistically, inbox “hopefully less than a dozen,” though that sounds much less cool), but for a different reason than mental peace: avoiding a pileup of unread emails ensures that I never miss a plum commission, lose an awesome tip, or accidentally delete a friend’s newsletter.

This electronic asceticism is not for everyone. If you are preternaturally chill, making it unbothersome to sift through 17 Old Navy sale emails sharing sacred space with a pitch you need to follow up on, I can’t teach you to want inbox zero any more than I can convince my three-year-old to put her shoes on the right feet.

But if the little blue bubble over the envelope on your iPhone ticking into five figures sends you into an anxiety spiral, I can show you how Gmail’s tools — a few well-designed folders, filters, and canned responses — keep my inbox organized, especially when combined with a writer’s best friend: procrastination.

Unsubscribe by Any Means Necessary

It takes less than a second to scan and assess most emails. Do I need to read it? Respond? Take action? Might I need it later? If the answer to all of those is no, figure out how to avoid getting the same email in the future.

Unsubscribe not just to the relentless Old Navy emails, but to any email that you need to neither read nor react to (whether by doing something or responding). The unsubscribe button is your best friend, but your second best friend is the Canned Responses tool. I have one that simply requests the sender unsubscribe me, which I use for anything offensive – PRs promoting immunity boosting drinks to fight Coronavirus, publications asking me to write for free, or people trying to pay me to promote a product – and a second one geared toward off-topic or poorly targeted press releases, explaining what I cover and asking to be removed from their list for anything else.

But if you want to know about Kamala Harris’s next virtual event or keep up with your friend’s newsletter about their quest to teach a dog to read, Gmail has another great feature: filters. Subscribe to lists with an alias, then using a filter, you can send all of those emails directly into your “To Read” folder, where they patiently await the next time you need to kill time. You can make as many aliases and folders as you want, even separating those you want to read from the ones you subscribe to only because you once went on a date with the author.

Procrastinate Like a Professional

Once the volume of unnecessary email comes down, it becomes easier to sort through the remaining useful and semi-useful emails. Those that have information I might someday want, like a press release that might be pertinent to a future story, get sorted into an appropriate folder — in that case, “Press People.” Any email that requires me to do some small task or needs only a quick answer, I respond to when I am checking email.

The key is finding a home for those other categories of emails: the unanswered questions that rely on a response from someone else, the pitches waiting for an editorial meeting, the tracking numbers for a package en route, or the emails that require work — emotional or mental — to respond to.

My flowchart has an answer for every permutation of what needs to be done with an email, and it harnesses the powerful tool that keeps journalists’ houses clean on deadline: procrastinating.

While the tech-bro version of inbox zero is all about tackling everything immediately, the journalist version draws its power from delaying everything for nearly forever using the snooze button — which gets the email out of my inbox and returns it as an unread message at a future date of my choosing.

On weekends, I snooze work emails until Monday morning. I snooze plane tickets to pop back up when I should check in for the flight; I snooze pitches until I should follow up; I snooze emails pending information from someone else until after I expect a response. If I need to clear time to research in order to answer a question, I snooze until I’ll have time — and then, let’s be honest, snooze again.

Emails, Like Diamonds, are Forever

The best thing about emails is that there’s no downside to letting them pile up in an out-of-the-way folder. Your mom won’t open the door and get buried under an avalanche of old sporting equipment like in an ‘80s sitcom. Mostly, I sort emails into folders labeled by client or for “Receipts” (find me pawing through this on April 14) or “Travel,” but sometimes, it’s just the catchall “Things to Save.” Because everything in Gmail is searchable, no matter how much mess you hide or where, you won’t have to paw through folders bursting with unsorted messages should you ever need it again.

That searchability makes it easy to get started with inbox zero: Simply take all your emails and shunt them away in an “Old Emails” folder. If you need one later, you can search for it. If not, you can pretend it doesn’t exist and gloat about your new blank slate.

In a few weeks, if you feel like you’re failing, repeat the process — as many times as you need — until you’re off all the email lists and the whole thing gets much easier. It’s also an option to give up and accept the gift of self-knowledge that you are just not an inbox zero person.

Click here for Inbox Zero: The Flowchart, our handy tool to help you decide what to do with each email.

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