By lkolowich@hubspot.com (Lindsay Kolowich Cox)

We’re inundated with email daily — making it hard to keep track of tasks and manage your workflow. However, organizing your emails doesn’t have to be a pain. In fact, it’s possible to get your Gmail inbox to zero in as little as 15 minutes.

While we can’t stop new emails from coming in, we can help you organize it better.

I stumbled upon Andreas Klinger’s inbox zero method for Gmail years ago and his method still works for me to this day. In this post, I’ll show you how to organize your Gmail inbox according to Klinger’s method so it’s clean, systematized, and easy to navigate — making you a more efficient, productive, and overall happier human being. I’ll also show you how I adapted his labeling system for content marketers.

Skip to:

• Zero Inbox Methodology Overview
• Zero Inbox Step-By-Step Guide

How to Get to Inbox Zero in Gmail

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s go over the basic methodology:

• You set up multiple inboxes in Gmail and give each of them a name, like “Needs Action/Reply” and “Awaiting Response.”
• Your general inbox will then appear on the left, and your labeled inboxes (which Gmail calls “panes”) will appear on the right, like so:

• You know that yellow star icon you can press to mark an email as important? Turns out you can turn on other colored stars and icons in Gmail, too, like bangs (i.e. exclamation points)and question marks. Gmail calls these icons “special stars.” In this methodology, each pane is represented by a different special star.
• Every time you get a new email in your inbox, you’ll want to:
  • Reply to the ones you can right away. For those you want to keep track of as “Awaiting Reply” or “Delegated,” mark with the appropriate special star.
  • Label the emails you need to deal with later by marking them with the appropriate special star.
  • For the ones that you don’t need to deal with or aren’t current, either archive them without special stars or delete them entirely.
• In the end, archive everything. This way, your inbox stays at zero and everything else is either in its designated pane, archived, or deleted.

The result? A clean inbox that’s easy to navigate and lets you triage new emails with little effort.

Here’s how to set this up in Gmail.

The Step-by-Step Guide to Getting to Inbox Zero in Gmail

Step 1: Prepare for your new inbox layout.

To make this whole process work, you’ll need to get rid of the Social and Promotions tabs. (Pro Tip: If you’re worried about getting an onslaught of social notifications and promotional emails in your inbox each day, then take this opportunity to set up filters so your social notifications are automatically …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron