The Inbox Zero gauntlet was thrown down before me the other day. One of the podcasters that I listen to talked about how he gets very nervous when he has a few e-mails in his inbox. He went on to say that he’s looked over his wife’s shoulder and she’ll have several hundred e-mails and it totally blows him away.

I looked at my out-of-control inbox and decided that the 14,416 unprocessed e-mails in my inbox had to be dealt with. And it needed to happen immediately. I even took a screen shot of my iPhone and put it out there on Twitter as to how bad my situation was. Nothing like a little bit of peer pressure to keep me on track.

But let me take a step back for a second. What’s the whole Inbox Zero thing anyway? My first exposure was from another podcast where Merlin Mann talked about keeping you actual e-mail inbox at a state where there are no e-mails in it after processing through what’s there. His explanation is really quite interesting as to exactly what he means by “zero e-mails”. One of the key tenets is that he uses filters to take the noisy e-mails and immediately place them in organized review folders. For many years, while I was using Outlook I did this, but I constantly ran into the problem that I needed more filters (called rules in Outlook) than the program would allow. When I switched to GMail, I started creating filters, but didn’t create enough. I did some investigation, and it appears that there is no limit to the number of filters that you create, and the number of filters doesn’t seem to slow down the arrival of e-mails into the e-mail system. That was another problem with Outlook. As the number of rules increased, there was a very perceptible lag as the rules were run. So much so that I would often purge my filters…creating more chaos in my inbox.

Last November I made a concerted effort to process through all the e-mail in my inbox. I also consolidated my three e-mail addresses (two personal and one business) into a single inbox. I actually took about four weeks to get through all the backlogged e-mails, but they were all processed and the inbox went to zero e-mails. For another two weeks I was successful at keeping pace with incoming e-mail. Four or so times a day I bulk processed all the e-mail that had come in, and there were none in the inbox. Talk about feeling in control.

Then life happened and I lost control. I checked my new e-mail regularly, and if anything needed addressed immediately, I took care of it. But I stopped filing e-mails that needed to be kept for reference. Sometimes I didn’t delete those that needed trashed. I seldom delegate e-mail, so none of that happened. Finally, I failed to move e-mails to appropriate holding areas for later review or processing. In short, I let my inbox get out of control. And it snowballed and got worse and worse. I’m not sure what the number is, but at a certain point you just throw up your hands and think “I’m never going to get this in control”. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s where I was earlier this week. I was staring at 14,000+ e-mails that needed to be dealt with, but I honestly didn’t know how to start.

So, the first thing I did was identify an e-mail among my most recent that I didn’t need. I’m subscribed to lots of newsletters ranging from industry stuff (healthcare IT, general IT, security, etc.) to personal stuff (gardening, electronic household control, photography) as well as lots of educational subjects. Some of them are really time sensitive, so if I haven’t read them in a week or so, they should just be pitched. I identified one and did a search on e-mails like it using the filtered searches in Gmail. Then, as a recovering pack-rat, I did one of the most difficult things imaginable. I deleted the whole lot of e-mails. The pain was magnified because you can only delete 20 e-mails at a time in the standard Gmail configuration. Then you have to select the next 20. The very first set I picked had 143 e-mails. So eight times I had to select the 20, delete them, then repeat. And each time if felt like a little bit of my inner pack-rat died. I kept thinking “What if there is something priceless in one of those e-mails? What if the cure for cancer was hidden in one of them? What if I’m compromising the attainment of World Peace by not reading them?” I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s a pretty good synopsis of how I feel when I delete anything. I know that it’s a problem, but it’s the kind of thing that runs through my head all the time.

But I forged ahead. 143 e-mails gone, “only” 14,273 to go. I picked another easy-to-identify e-mail that was ripe for deleting and I deleted it and it’s brethren. I kept repeating this process without thinking any further than “I need to clear out these e-mails”. I kept going. And going. I was becoming the Energizer Bunny of deleting e-mail. I was going to call it a night when I got to 12,146 e-mails in my inbox. But I got a second wind and I kept forging ahead. When I had to call it a night, I “only” had 11,336 e-mails left in my inbox. At that point, I took the screen shot showing my inbox with 11,336 e-mails in it and tweeted to my buddy Jeff Stephens the kind of trouble I was in. His return tweet was soaked in terror. He was aghast that anybody could let their digital world get that far out of control. It was at that moment that I knew I was going to have to get to Inbox Zero because I’d put it out there in cyberspace that I had a problem and that I was attacking it.

You see, I’m really competitive. Ridiculously so. And once I put my mind to something, it’s pretty hard to stop me. When you couple that tenacity with the public humiliation of failing at a task I was crowing about being able to do…you have the mixture for either a spectacular triumph or a dismal failure. I wasn’t going to fail though.

And the obsession began. Although I was working on a couple of other projects, I opened Gmail every chance I got and processed a few more e-mails. I started creating filters instead of just deleting e-mails. Sure, some got deleted summarily. Others I opened, unsubscribed to, and then deleted. A different set got opened, a filter created, and the whole lot were moved into folders for later review. Finally another group were given filters and archived.

I actually have a pretty cool folder structure in Gmail. In addition to the standard inbox, where everything arrives, I have two main categories for e-mails: @@Review and @Archive. The “@” signs come from the concepts of Getting Things Done by David Allen. The added benefit of using these indicators is that the “@” sorts to the top of most alphanumeric lists, so I can control where these folders appear. I have mirrored the sub-folders underneath these two top-level folders. For instance, I have folders for Family & Parenting, Household, and Organizing under both @@Review and @Archive. When an e-mail comes in, it’s moved to the appropriate @@Review sub-folder. This allows me to process e-mails with similar content in a single batch. If an e-mail needs to be saved for later reference, it’s moved from the @@Review folder to the same @Archive folder.

I’ll admit that I haven’t been as effective a processing through all the @@Review folders as I would like. But, I’m getting better at it. I’ve even setup reminders to help me remember that I need to do this. You would think that I wouldn’t need that level of hand-holding (I’m supposed to be an adult), but I seem to need the reminders and cajoling. Since I’ve instituted those reminders the sub-folders have been processed much better.

I hacked away at the e-mails in my inbox. I realized that there were search terms within the e-mails that might make processing faster. For instance, I have a lot of recipe sites that I subscribe to for my work on Hectic-Kitchen. So I searched on any e-mail in the inbox (using the search phrase label:inbox in Gmail) that had the word recipe in the email. I selected those and sent them to the @@Archive/Hectic-Kitchen/Recipes folder. I did the same for other reference material. In many cases I also setup filters to skip the inbox and send the specific e-mails to their respective archival folders.

The idea behind the filters is to cut down on the inbox clutter in the future, so I was actually killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, I was cleaning the inbox as it currently existed and I was preparing to auto-process e-mails in the future to avoid the disaster that I’d already had once.

After deleting, delegating (a few), deferring, archiving, and processing e-mails over the course of two days, I had the number down to 1,992 e-mails in my inbox. I kept at it, slogging through the e-mails that were a little more difficult to decide upon. Those last 1,900 took quite a bit more brainpower, but at the middle of the evening tonight, I had exactly ZERO e-mails in my inbox.

While I still have several deferred folders that I need to process, my inbox is under control. And the e-mails are now sorted into groupings that make sense to process together.

So I’m throwing it out there that it’s possible to get even the most audaciously out-of-control inbox back into tip-top shape. If you really apply yourself, you don’t even have to take that long. Of course, if you have the pack-rat gene, you’re going to have to set it aside for the inevitable deletions that must occur.

As I’m completing this post, I have no e-mails in my inbox. When I wake up tomorrow morning, every single e-mail will be new to me. Then I’ll decide what to do with each one and get that inbox back to zero e-mails.

And I’ve just made an implicit commitment to you, dear reader, that I’m going to keep my inbox under control Feel free to check in with me and see how I’m doing. In the meantime, feast your eyes on the fact that my Mail icon doesn’t have a number above it! For now, I’m at Inbox Zero!