- These are the types of emails I might wake up to
on a typical day at work.
So, the first thing I'd do is to go through them
and sort them by their types.
And within five to 10 minutes,
I'm left with the inbox that looks like this.
Hi friends, welcome back to the channel.
If you're new here, my name is Jeff,
and we're all about practical career and interview tips.
So, if you're a current student or young professional,
consider subscribing for more actionable content.
A simple Google search will tell you there are many benefits
to Inbox Zero.
So, instead of wasting your time and go through them
one by one, I've broken down this video into three parts.
Number one, I'm gonna share
with you the one practical reason that made me switch
to this method four and a half years ago,
then I'm gonna walk you through
the step-by-step instructions on how to set up Inbox Zero
for yourself, and finally, I'll go through the workflow
I take every morning, by replicating the types of emails
I receive at work as a product marketer.
So, let's get started.
Whether you're a student or working professional,
this might be how your inbox looks like on a typical day.
Theoretically, we should all be focusing
on the unread emails that had come in since the last time
we checked our inbox.
But as human beings, our eyes are sometimes drawn
to the red emails, the ones that we have already dealt with
and should forget about.
So, we lose our focus.
We get distracted.
A recent study has shown that it takes on average 64 seconds
for us to get back on track.
In other words, one of the main benefits of Inbox Zero
is that as each new email arrives,
you're not distracted by seeing a swirl of earlier messages.
Not only will that distraction make you less productive,
but will also cause you to make
more careless mistakes as well.
The entire Inbox Zero method centers on the idea
that all emails you receive
fall broadly into three categories.
Number one, emails that you need to take action on.
For example, your boss needs you to use something.
Number two emails, you need another party or someone else
to take action on, but you're still responsible
for the outcome.
For example, someone owes you information for a report
that you're writing.
And number three, emails that you might want
to "Read Through" again because they contain
useful information, an industry report, for example.
Two things to know before we begin this tutorial.
First, although I'll be using Gmail
for this demonstration Inbox Zero works
with most other email service providers as well,
like Outlook and Yahoo.
And second, all the changes that you make today
can be undone, so don't worry about screwing up your inbox.
It's perfectly safe diving right into it.
First, you wanna go to your Gmail Settings
on the top right corner here and click see all Settings.
Then you wanna go to the advanced tab
and enable "Auto Advance" and click save changes.
This will bring you back to the main screen.
And then we dive right back into Settings, See All Settings.
And this time you wanna go to the "General tab",
and go down to "Auto Advance" and make sure
the "Go to the next newer conversation" option
is selected here, and also go down to "Keyboard shortcuts",
and make the keyboard shortcuts it's turned on.
That's it, and you wanna click "Save changes".
Now we go back into our Settings,
and this time we go to the "Labels" tab here,
and we create four different labels.
The first one, "Follow up",
with a space between follow and up, click "Create".
The second is just the word "Waiting", click "create".
Third, "Read Through",
with a space between Read and Through,
and finally "Calendar".
So, in order for the next step to work, make sure
you're following along exactly as I'm doing it right now,
but you can always adjust it later on.
So, don't worry.
Now the four labels are created.
You don't need to click "Save Changes" or anything
'cause it's just been created.
Now we just go to the Inbox tab here,
and instead of the Default inbox
you actually change now to Multiple inboxes.
Now, I already have these things typed out here
for your reference, but for the purpose of this video,
we'll go through this and type it out together.
First for the section one search query,
just type in the letter, "L", colon, "Follow", hyphen, "Up".
Section name is "Action Items".
Section two would be "L", colon, "Waiting",
and then section name would be "Awaiting Reply".
Section three would be
"L", colon, "Read", hyphen, "Through",
and Section name could just be "Read Through",
and then we're gonna save the "Calendar label"
for something later on.
We'll get back to that.
For now though, the maximum page size just make it 10,
"Multiple inbox position",
make it to the right of the inbox,
"Importance markers", "No markers',
and "Filtered mail", "Don't override filters",
and click "Save changes".
I promise you all this will make sense in a few seconds.
Once you've made those adjustments,
and saved all your changes, you should be brought back
to your main inbox screen.
Nothing crazy has happened so far.
Three empty sections have popped up
on the right-hand side here,
but here is where it gets really interesting.
So, let's say I wake up to these emails at the beginning
of a typical Workday.
The first thing I'll do is to go through them
and sort them by their types,
starting at the very bottom here.
First one, Mobile Advertising Outlook 2021,
seems like an interesting report.
I might wanna refer back to this later on.
So, I first type "L' on my keyboard for Label,
start typing in "Read Through",
and once the option comes up,
press Enter to apply the Read Through label,
and then press E for archive.
Now, because we enable Auto Advanced feature,
once we archive the current email,
we go to the next newer email down the list,
which saves us a lot of time.
And here's another report, YouTube Advertising 2020,
very interesting, press L again, "Read Through",
press Enter, apply the label.
Hmm, interesting, Mobile Gaming Report
from Iron source it seems like.
I'll again press L for Label, "Read Through",
apply that label,
and finally at the annual report,
these are all is pretty cool.
I press L, "Read Through", press Enter, and applied
four "Read Through" labels
to these four corresponding emails.
And you will see how this looks in your clean inbox,
in your main inbox screen rather, in a little bit.
Press E again, it goes to the next email.
This seems to be a very old email from 2018.
I can definitely forget about it.
So, I don't need to take any action here,
I'll just archive it by pressing E straight away.
All the mails from 2019, archive.
There, nothing needed,
and "FYI", For Your Information email
that people usually keep others in a loop
if they're part of the same project, I read through it,
I know what's going on, great.
No action on my part, press E to archive.
A big project wrap up.
There is a summary,
there are learnings,
are there next steps.
I might want to actually apply some of the learnings
from this project from another person,
to my marketing campaign later on.
So, I want to read through it.
Press "L' for label, "Read Through", press Enter,
and apply that label, and press E to archive this.
And here's an update that's sent to a huge email alias
that doesn't directly affect me.
I can archive this directly, but here's a pro tip.
You can press M for mute.
So, basically what that does,
if other people reply all to this email chain,
you will not receive the notification
unless it's to you directly.
So, I press M instead of E here,
it mutes and archives that email.
And now we get to an Action Required,
something I do need to do, or apparently,
I'll be in very big trouble,
and apparent. I'm a young man.
So, I press L for label, and start typing in "Follow Up".
Follow Up.
Once that option comes up, press Enter.
I've applied the follow-up label to this email,
and I press E again to archive it.
I always end with an archive.
And there's a colleague of mine
who needs a little bit of help.
I'm definitely be happy to help, so I press L,
start typing "Follow Up" again, and press Enter,
and I press E again.
So, this is how my inbox looks right now.
Very clean.
The main inbox part has zero emails,
and all your action items and "Read Through" emails
have shifted to the right, because you applied the labels
and you have archived those emails.
Now we can make this look a little prettier
by applying some color coding.
If you click the "Follow Up" label,
I like to add the red color to this.
Four "Read Through", I like to add green,
and for "Waiting", I like to add a yellow.
Another small pro tip here,
If you go into any of these emails,
let's say I just put them in a Big project one,
and I wanna go back to my main inbox screen
without having to click on the inbox tab here,
you can just type in G and I,
which stands for "Go to Inbox",
and you'll be brought back to the main inbox screen,
and it refreshes your inbox as well.
So, the idea here, is now your maintenance box is clean,
you can focus your attention on the "Follow Up" action items
that you have already labeled,
and spend any free time you have going
through the "Read Through" emails.
Some of you might be wondering why
the "Waiting" inbox is still empty.
We'll remember for waiting emails,
those are the ones where someone else needs to take action,
but you are still responsible for the outcome.
For example, you're putting together a report
and you're waiting for your colleague to send you some data
that only they have access to.
In that case, let's say you write an email
asking for the data.
You press C for compose,
You write to your colleague,
"Hey, please, please, please give me that data,
"You're the best,
"Okay, thanks bye".
And you press Command Enter to send it out.
Now, the more manual way to use the Waiting label,
is to go to your Sent email folder,
click that email you just sent, and you press L for Label,
start typing in "Waiting", click Enter,
and you apply the Waiting label,
and you press G and I, "Go to your Inbox" hotkey,
and you're brought back to your main screen here,
and we just need to wait a little bit.
And there you see your sent email has now popped up
in the Awaiting Reply inbox section.
So, this reminds you to chase the other person
for that information if they haven't gotten back to you
in the few days.
But you know me, I'm all about efficiency.
So, I'm gonna show you a cool trick using the filters
to help you automate that process.
First, go back to your Settings,
and go to the "Filters" up here,
and create a new filter.
In the two fields, type your own email address,
with a plus sign, and the word "waiting" @gmail.com.
The cool thing about Gmail is that
it actually recognizes your main email,
regardless of what you put behind the plus sign,
which is kind of cool.
And then you create filter and you want to skip the inbox,
"Mark as read", and apply the label "Waiting"
and you click "Create filter".
And now on this page, press a G and I,
go back to your inbox, refreshes it.
And now when you write that follow-up email,
pressing C, Compose,
and you're chasing them for the second time.
In the BCC field, you can start typing in your own email,
plus "Waiting" @g-mail.com,
and then, "Hey, this is the second reminder.
"Please help a brother out".
"Hi, please help".
And press Command Enter to send it out.
And you'll see in a couple of seconds here,
that, or you can refresh your page
by pressing G and I,
that the second waiting email has popped up,
and this has been sent automatically to yourself,
and the label has been applied automatically
because it recognizes your BCC field.
Another small hack that has made my life a lot easier
involves Calender invites.
So, by default, if you send someone a calendar invite
using Google calendar for example, and they accept,
you will always receive a notification saying
the other person has accepted your calendar invite.
But if you think about it,
there's really no need for you to know
if someone has accepted.
You only need to know if someone has rejected
your Calender invite so we can reschedule.
So, there's a filter for that.
You can create a filter with the following properties.
You go back to the Filters tab, Create a new filter,
and in the 'Has the words" field,
file name, colon, Invite.ICS, and excepted.
You create the filter and skip the inbox,
mark as read, Create filter.
Now, whenever you send a calendar invite out
and someone accepts, that Accepted notification
will by default be archive and skips your main inbox
so you don't have to see it.
Circling back to how you can apply all this to your inbox,
because obviously your inbox is not gonna be as clean
as my example one, you might have hundreds if not thousands
of unarchived emails instead of 10 to 20.
So, my advice is, number one, go back three to four weeks
of your inbox and label your emails
in the way I just went through.
Archive all the irrelevant emails, label "Follow Up"
for the emails you need to take action on,
"Waiting" for emails that you need someone else
to take action on,
and ""Read Through"" four emails
you know you want to reference at some point down the line.
Then, here comes a super, super scary part.
You wanna select all your emails in your main inbox,
select all the conversations,
and you wanna click "Archive".
Do not worry, archive does not mean delete.
It just simply means it's gone from the main inbox.
You can always find those emails again
in your All Mail folder here.
And that sums up the basics of Inbox Zero.
There's actually quite a lot of fun stuff
you can do with labels and filters.
But I save that for another video.
So, let me know that in the comments
if that is something you'd like to see more of,
and or if you have any questions about the setup process.
Now that you have your inbox set up in a more efficient way,
you're free to check out my other video
on how to write professional emails.
Subscribe if you haven't already,
and in the meantime, have a great one.
(upbeat music)