I have always been a huge proponent of keeping an empty email inbox, and I have found it very effective to look at emails with a very black and white lens - you either need to take action now, or save the task related to the email for some future date. Either way, the email should be moved or deleted.
But over the past year, I have fallen off the wagon. Badly. Currently, between my three active email inboxes, I have over 4,000 emails sitting there. The vast majority of these have been read and either need to be deleted or moved to a to-do list somewhere. But the sheer volume is overwhelming.
Google recently acknowledged this growing problem with their roll out of the Priority Inbox in GMail. But I've had a hard time integrating Priority Inbox into my workflow.
Today, I stumbled on a nifty tool called Good To Do. It is a simple, bare-bones online to-do list. And one of the features I really love is the ability to simply forward an email to your Good To Do account (i.e. wednesday@goodtodo.com) and have it automatically become an active "To-Do" for a particular date. Thus the email: 1) becomes a more concrete action item with a due date assigned, and 2) can be safely deleted or archived from your email inbox, thus reducing the clutter.
Check out their demo video below. I have no affiliate relationship with Good To Do. I'm not even sure if they have an affiliate program. This is just one of those things that was too good not to share with my readers.
The Challenge: Use one of the tools above to clean up your inbox and leave a comment on this post with the details. The person who reduces the most clutter (i.e. gets rid of the most emails from their inbox) using either of the above tools and shares their story here gets a free hour of SEO consulting for their website.
Here's to an empty inbox!
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