Peace of Mind Organizing

Getting to Inbox Zero (again)

4 March 2026

I tend to consider myself someone who’s good about staying on top of email. (I’ve certainly blogged about it enough.) But in 2026, I’ve let the email in my peaceofmindorganizing.com email inbox pile up. (I use an iCloud address for shopping and other personal things and I don’t mind that it’s always voluminous.) I think part of the problem is that I’m doing a bunch of administrative work around implementing a new costumer relationship management system for the business and my brain is fried by the end of the day. And then, of course, the bulging email box feels overwhelming.

But today I decided to get serious about it.

I wrote on my task list, “Spend 30 minutes on email.” I started the day with 331 emails, 165 of which were unread. My goal was that by the end of the 30 minutes, I’d have fewer than 20 emails in there. (I read and process my email in my MacBook’s email client.)

Here’s how it went:

• I set a timer for eight minutes. Then I sorted my messages by sender. That allowed me to do some bulk deletes, like the many-times-a-day emails I am sent by the Washington Post. I’m not great about deleting those in real time. So in my first eight minutes, I deleted a ton of messages pretty easily. At the end of those eight minutes, I had 131 messages left, 29 of the unread.

• I set a timer for four minutes and continued going through my inbox. I deleted and archived a lot of messages. At the end of the four minutes, I had 47 messages, none of them unread.

• A little while later, I tried again, setting my timer for four minutes. By then, some emails had come in, so my starting point had gone up to 52 messages. These messages were tougher—they actually required some effort. They either needed a response or they served as reminders for actions I needed to take. So I only whittled my box down by 6 messages in that four-minute burst, to 46 messages. (But I got stuff done that had been languishing!)

• I stepped away for a few hours and when I came back, I set my timer for 10 minutes. (I forgot to look at the new starting point.) At the end of the 10 minutes, I was down to 21 messages.

You may recall that my goal had been 20 messages so I almost stopped there. But 21 isn’t 20 and I decided to spend a little more time and close to zero I could get it.

I didn’t set a timer and I don’t know how long it took (maybe 15 minutes?), but I got my inbox down to ZERO messages! Break out the champagne! Now that I’m at ground zero it will be so much easier to keep up.

To recap, in 26 minutes of focused effort today, I reduced my inbox from 331 messages to 21 messages.

And then I went ahead got rid of the rest.

For me, the real key to dealing with accumulated emails is sorting by sender because it makes it so easy to bulk delete or archive messages. And of course this is a great opportunity to unsubscribe from newsletters that you don’t read. I did some of that too.

I don’t think Inbox Zero as a daily practice is sustainable for 2026 me. I did it for months back in 2011 and maybe I’ll surprise myself. In any case, I’m hopeful that the effort I made today will motivate me to at least delete the low-hanging fruit every day.

Tagged with: email

Comments