Thread by @dunkhippo33

Friday thread on email and how I get to Inbox Zero almost everyday.

On ave, I receive 200-300 emails per day. Here's how I process mine.

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1) At a strategic level, I use the Yesterbox email system.

tl;dr - I look at emails that came in yesterday today. So you only have a finite # of emails to process. (but sometimes I "rescue" impt emails that have come in today and answer them today :D)

https://twitter.com/dunkhippo33/status/1255649053217419264

2) To implement Yesterbox, I use @boomerang to pause my inbox. It holds all emails that I'm not looking at today in a different folder. When I unpause, it brings all those emails into my inbox.

3) I use a LOT of email tools. It's worth it. I truly believe being able to respond to everyone easily and quickly is impt in my line of work.

I use @sanebox. It auto-filters out typically 50-100 emails a day through its smart filtering system. Super underrated tool!

4) @sanebox is usually correct in deciding which emails to filter out. Unfort, sometimes it filters out cold-emails (esp pitches) which I find days later.

So if you don't get a response from me, it probably got filtered out.

5) I use @Superhuman to mass archive emails. That's probably another 50 emails or so. Emails where I don't need to respond. Group threads etc.

6) That leaves ~100 emails or so to process. 30-40 of those are easy. 1 line / 1 word responses. Or responses where I can use canned templates. I now have a lot of canned templates for common things. Like "schedule here at this link!" or "submit your pitch on our website".

7) It's those last 60-70 emails that take up the most time. If a long response is needed, I'll usually shoot a video or record a voice response.

8) I have my own homegrown voice tool called speak memos which allows me to record voice msgs for ppl.

For video, I used to use the gmail Potion extension (but lately has been broken for me). Sometimes I use Scribe AI.

9) Then there are some emails that I just send to come back to me later. Anything where I have to download files to organize them in a Google Drive or folder -- I bounce back to me on Fridays. I only do that activity on Fridays.

Then on Fri, I do a whole bunch of that one task.

10) Things take time when you have to task-switch, so there are common tasks in email such as scheduling or organizing files or introductions that are better batched together. I'm always looking to do blocks of similar activities together to avoid task-switching.

11) The remaining 60 emails or so that I just need to write, I just plough through. Admittedly the whole processing of email takes ~2 hours.

80/20 rule applies here. 80% of the emails I can process in 20% of the time. 20% of the emails require lots of actual typing.

12) A demoralizing part of "regular email" is it doesn't end. So you are constantly on an email hamster wheel of new emails coming in. That's just draining.

But the Yesterbox system prevents that. You see the light at the end of the tunnel (before doing it again tmrw!)