I declare inbox victory! With the help of the Andrew Dubber method, I have successfully recovered from ‘inbox death‘ and now have a joyously empty screen in front of me where once sat some 28478 items, 14514 of which were unread, with 1446 ’starred’ to reply to. It was bad. Broken bad.

But now, when I open up my Gmail account, I am presented by a serenity that I have not experienced since, umm, perhaps when I actually opened the account in the first place?

So a huge thank you to Andrew for setting a side a day of his life to drag me kicking and screaming through the cold turkey email purge that was today. It was liberating but very very hard.

At one point it all got very emotional and existential, and I was playing the resistant, know-it-all ‘but surely’ creative. Andrew wouldn’t have any of it and patiently sat there through six hours of coffee-fuelled hammering of the keyboard to get me here.

And also a big thank you to the staff at The Kitchen Garden Cafe for providing the ‘get out of the bubble’ environment where it could happen. Shame about the looping reggae music all day, but hey, it gave me some idea of how long we’d been there.

For anyone interested in the process in detail. Here are my raw notes of the process from today, starting from the moment I opened my Gmail account, turned off the phone, took a sip of coffee and jumped into the digital maelstrom…

How I got control of my inbox back:

My notes:

Since March 2005 I still have unread email

Step 1. Mark all as read

Stef argues - mark anything unread as ‘never-read’

Step 2. Delete all spam messages - 223000

6876MB originally,

Deleting the spam broke email

Then 6 spam left - 2 spam per minute

6111MB free

That cleared 760 MB

before:2008/6/1 label:never-read

Mark all anonymous email as read

All items never read before june

Get rid of all of the numbers - All mail, select all, mark as read

Write down all my projects - about 50

Install Ghost Action

Select all Drafts and hit “discard drafts”

Archive all mail before June 1st using this search: before:2008/6/1, then select all conversations and click Archive

Go through each label in turn and select all and click the Archive button - this removes them from the inbox

Now 1964 in the inbox

Go to “Anonymous” filter, containing anything that is sent to me as a BCC, mailing list, spam that got through somehow.

Select all.

Delete.

10491 emails deleted

Delete all Facebook messages - 1384 messages

Create filters for things rather than deleting them each time

Empty trash: 16222 emails

5511 MB - 77% full

Apply “Delete on receive” filters. Eg. mailing lists

I still have 1600 filtered messages in my inbox from the last month

Archive anything that has gone to anything other than stef@3form.net

using label:office label:Inbox

Inbox: 1559

Google Calendar - delete all conversations

Twitter - put direct messages to my phone instead of email. Go to http://twitter.com/accounts and make changes

Delete all old twitter messages

Inbox: 1253

“Ecademy - I never want to hear from them again”. Set up a filter.

1209

Remove comments on projects I get notifications for. Eg. Big Picture - archive them.

1112

Working backwards in the inbox attacking each message at a time.

Anyone who emails me too much with stuff that I don’t care about. Delete, with a filter so I don’t receive their messages again. Eg. huxley.com

I now have less than a twentieth of the emails I started with.

1098

Filters for photobox, etc.

1056

Archive everything from close working colleagues

922

Ooh! Discovered “Filter messages like these” function under the “More Actions” drop down menu.

Viadeo.com - crap. Gone. (Gets a laugh)

894

Expedia mailshots, lasminute mailshots

label:never-read and label:Inbox

Archive them

523

Search for “out of office”. Filter.

Archive Emily’s emails to me

482

Archive dubber!

438

Archive estelle

Archive anything Wordpress admin related

398

Archive everything marked “never-read”

336

Delete all “out of office autoreply”

333

Start ’starring’ the ones that need to stay in the inbox. Then tick all the ones that need to be deleted.

Delete the ticked ones.

Then do ’select unstarred’ and click ‘archive’

Again - work backwards so that the items that appear at the bottom are ones you have already filtered once you hit delete.

Select all unstarred and then archive. Repeat, working backwards through the pages using “newer” until the last month’s mail has been filtered.

Lots of “please moderate” - delete them.

254

217

Naymz. Nuked - it’s lame.

212

Went to a conference called 2gether08 - it was good. Archive everything but make a rule that filters anything with “receipt” and “your order” to an “accounts” label to make accounting easier.

Make an “invitation” filter to flag up anything that might be of interest. I think paper invites are best.

I was on a kids TV show this month. Archive the lot.

173

Okay. Lots of starred items. Just archive them.

1369 starred conversations.

Inbox: 147

Hmm - must have missed Dubber. Search dubber label:inbox and archive them.

111

Filter google analytics reports to skip the inbox and mark as read.

Ha! Lots of “test” emails. search for subject:test and delete.

79

My emails FIT ON TWO PAGES.

Okay.

The inbox is empty.

Nice.

Next. Ghost Action.

Set up contexts.

Where I do things - home, phone, driving, etc.

Then add projects. 50 things I am involved in. Go through all recent email to define these no matter how small.

Search: before:2008/1/1 label:starred

Remove star. Basically I am not going to respond to emails that are this old. Yeah. Sorry.

381 starred messages! From 1400

Working from oldest first.

Delete anything that has a big file attachment that you don’t need. Rubbish demos from people with the whole MP3 attached etc.

February already. Andrew says “If it was urgent and I hadn’t heard for three months I’d have got in touch another way”.

Okay. Feeling guilty about not responding to so many emails. Really exciting projects I couldn’t be involved in, things I wanted to do but couldn’t. Great people I didn’t just send a quick “cool” back to because I was so busy. The chances of even a “sorry” being relevant are minimal.

So.

before:2008/5/1 label:starred

Remove Star.

Phone messages I missed are in there. Ugh.

Guilt.

What’s this?! Something in my inbox?!

Unstarring things one at a time

72

I have 62 emails to send.

Move them all to the inbox.

Remove all the stars.

I have 62 items in my inbox.

I have no starred items.

I have nothing in my spam folder.

Ace.

Send apologetic emails to a handful of things that I have missed and that don’t seem too far in the past to be strange to bring up.

Eg. Kevin Johnson sent me a Linkedin mail about a potential project. I didn’t get back to him at the time. So I sent him a note to apologise.

Okay. An email that requires a long response to Simon Redgrave on a few points.

Archive the email so it is not in the inbox, add an action in Ghost Action saying “Email Simon Redgrave”

Respond. Archive. Delete. Action. And so on… 52

Send some painful emails to people who’ve been waiting for ages. Get some positive responses back… looks like they appreciate just having the email which is great.

25…

Down to the last hard-core 5 emails. Make some tasks to handle things that require more considered responses, but email each person telling them that that’s what’s happened.

Down to the last handful.

EMPTY INBOX! Woot!

Tweet away on the fact…

And of course some joker takes it upon himself to pitch in with just one more email for me to respond to… thanks Pete

And relax.

What next?

I have some more of Andrew’s time tomorrow. Apparently it’s all about putting processes in place to make sure I stay this way, and become filled with zen-like productivity. Here’s hoping…

If you’ve managed inbox victory recently - let me know if the comments! If not, and you want to - I hope my notes come in useful. Set aside a day and just make it happen.

You can do it if I can right?!

Let me know in the comments… and good luck.

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