Reach inbox zero with the Getting Things Done three-step workflow

Getting Things Done is a tried-and-tested productivity system that helps you keep your life and work commitments under control – which of course includes email management. If you’re constantly overwhelmed by email and never-ending tasks, this is the guide to help you regain control of your inbox and to put your task management on auto-pilot! It’s predominantly a way of achieving inbox zero, which is in turn a way of managing your inbox to save you time and help you be more productive. So without further ado, let’s check out exactly what inbox zero and Getting Things Done are and how you can utilise them in your work life.

What is inbox zero?

Inbox zero is a method in email management suitable for Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, or almost any other email client. It’s all in the name – you should have no emails (or almost no emails) left in your inbox as a result.

The approach originates from the eponymous book by Merlin Mann, a well-known productivity expert, which was published back in 2014. There are five actions that Mann recommends to follow to achieve inbox zero:

• Delete: get rid of (or archive) emails that serve no further purpose. 
• Delegate: if someone else can answer the email better, forward it to them. 
• Respond: respond immediately to emails and not keep them open. 
• Defer: move the messages that will take some time to respond to a separate category.
• Do: make sure you stay on top of emails that require a timely response. 

Following this approach especially helps those who are running a business which relies on email communication and regularly email with multiple clients. So how can you maximise your chances of reaching inbox zero? Our favourite way is by using GTD.

What is Getting Things Done (GTD)?

Getting Things Done is a productivity framework for organizing and tracking tasks and projects, developed by business productivity consultant and author David Allen. The original book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, has been published in over thirty languages globally. The GTD system, when implemented correctly, is a foolproof method that lets you keep track of what you need to do, should do, or should consider doing.

What makes GTD so special?

Unlike most productivity methods, GTD is not about time-saving hacks or quick fixes. Instead, GTD focuses on being present and mindful as well as confident that your current action is the correct one. Many of our tasks and duties, such as creative thinking, strategies, and ideas, do not necessarily take our time, but they take up a lot of room in our brain.

What does this mean? When we have multiple tasks in mind, we lack the mental space to actually focus on any of them. This causes us to feel overwhelmed, stressed, and eventually discouraged to work on important tasks. But when you have external storage for ideas, your brain is no longer clogged by future or past to-dos. This leaves you a clear headspace for what you should do right now.

When your mind is clear, you are calm, focused, present, and able to maintain a high level of awareness. In an age of constant information flow, Getting Things Done is not just about getting things done, but meaningfully engaging with what you do.

The five steps of the Getting Things Done workflow

What’s great about GTD is that it’s flexible and suitable for any kind of workflow. It doesn’t matter what tools you use, as long as they allow you to go through the following steps:

1. Capture everything that has your attention: to-dos, ideas, recurring tasks, etc. You can use pen and paper, a to-do app, or anything that helps you stay organized. Capture everything so you don’t have to think about it until it’s time to do it again.
2. Clarify what you have to do: break down your ideas into actionable steps so there is no barrier in doing the task. If the action can be done right away, you can already get it done immediately!
3. Organize your clarified items, and rank these items by category and priority. You can also assign due dates and set reminders so you will follow up on them.
4. Review: with your tasks sorted and ready to be completed, don’t forget to take the time to review your system regularly and reflect on your list. Look over what your next action should be. If you have organised your list correctly, you should be able to pick upcoming tasks efficiently. If a task is still vaguely defined, break it down further. Then give your list an in-depth review to see where you’re making progress, where you need to adjust priorities and how it’s working for you.
5. Engage and get working! Your system is now set up and your tasks have been broken down in manageable chunks with varying priorities. You can now comfortably engage with your work knowing what all your commitments are and that what you’re doing right now is the best thing to do.

Mailbutler can help you organise your inbox

The power of GTD and inbox zero

The average office worker receives 121 emails daily and sends out forty from their Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail inboxes. Even if you’re not alarmed by this number, you must know how it feels to stare at the unread count in your inbox and think, “I’m never going to get all this done.”

There are countless ways to approach the ultimate dream of inbox zero – many focusing on creating folders, filters or multiple inboxes (for example, having an account in both Apple Mail and Gmail). But first, let’s quickly review the five commandments of inbox zero:

1. Time is precious. We won’t be able to take action on every email we receive.  Accepting this fact allows us to concentrate on what actually matters.
2. 20/80 principle. Not all emails are created equally. 20% of our emails consume 80% of our focus. The remaining four-fifths of less-important emails can be handled quickly.
3. Less is more. The longer your emails, the more time it takes for you to write them and for your recipients to go through them. Write concisely and straight to the point.
4. Cut loose emotions. Anxiety and frustration can build up when we open a full inbox. That’s not what we should focus on: we should focus on getting stuff done.
5. Set realistic expectations and priorities. Learning when to say no and what deserves your time is crucial in achieving inbox zero. Focus on what’s important now, and accept that not everything can be accomplished. Instead, decide which emails are your priority.

Set up your GTD email workflow

Now we’ve gone through the basics of GTD and inbox zero, setting up a GTD email workflow is easy. We designed the following GTD email workflow incorporating many of Mailbutler’s features, but they’re entirely optional and only serve as additional helpers for this GTD email system. Remember, the GTD email workflow helps to get you to inbox zero regardless of whether you use Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, or even another email client.

Steps to kickstart your GTD email workflow

Set times to remove unwanted emails

Block out a few hours of your day to first unsubscribe from your unwanted newsletters. To speed things up, make use of inbox features that let you quickly opt out from unwanted email lists. Most clients, like Outlook for example, has an unsubscribe feature which can remove you from mail lists and send emails from a specific sender directly to your junk folder. The Mailbutler Snooze feature can also help with this.

Block out times in the day to work on emails

Decide how often you want to check your inbox. We recommend you to set up intervals during the day that won’t disturb you from focusing on deep work. Time block yourself for these intervals, so you have dedicated and undisturbed times only for your emails. The key is to disable your email notifications when you’re not checking them – or, if you’re strict and always check during your email time, disabling them completely.

Archive your older emails

If you find your current unopened emails to be a little too overwhelming to begin your GTD workflow, try moving all your ‘pre-inbox zero’ emails into a separate archive folder. (To further prove the point of inbox zero, we guarantee you won’t actually need to look back at this folder after you started sorting your emails with GTD.)

Organise your inbox

GTD requires you to act on each email that either needs action or can be immediately archived. While we believe the search functionality is powerful enough to look for any email, depending on your needs, you can also set up the following folders, which act as archiving locations:

• References: This is a folder for important documentation, receipts, invoices – anything you might need for later referencing.
• Project: If you receive emails constantly about a certain project (or email campaign), you might want to put them in specific projects folder.

Moreover, Mailbutler can convert your emails to tasks and notes to help you with taking action on them.

Deal with incoming emails with this simple three-step GTD workflow

Step one: Capture

Your email inbox is where potential tasks, ideas or projects enter your workflow. We need to first establish that our Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail inbox is an in-basket we need to check regularly in order to stay on top of things. An actionable email will result in a next step that can be broken down to smaller tasks.

Step two: Clarify

Clarify each email by asking, “Can I do something about this email?” If you can’t do anything about it, it’s time to delete it or archive it, immediately! But if you can do something about it, move on to the next step:

Step three: Organize

Ask yourself this question about any emails which you can take action on: “Can I do this under two minutes?” If you can do something about it in less than two minutes, then you should do it right now. Reply immediately and then archive it or move it to the appropriate folder. If the sent email requires a follow-up, set a Follow-up Reminder, or create a task with your to-do app. If you can’t reply, you should either delegate the email to someone who can take care of it or do the required task. Either way, always delete or archive the email after you’ve finished.

If you can’t do the task in under two minutes, then you should do the task at a later date when you have some time to dedicate to it. One option is to add a Reminder to the email and sync it with your preferred task manager. Then you can come back to take action when you have a minute. Another option is to use a feature such as email snoozing to have the email reappear in your inbox later, so you don’t forget to take action. Finally, you could attach a note for yourself in the email so you don’t have to read the entire email again. You can do this with the Maibutler Notes and Tasks feature.

Tips for reaching inbox zero

It’s not just GTD that can help you reach inbox zero, though. To really get there, it’s all about your attitude. Read on to learn more about how a change in perspective can help your chances of getting your inbox totally organised.

Adopt the right attitude

Right now, there is a big chance that your inbox has at least twenty unread messages. If yes, you need to adopt the right attitude for the inbox zero approach. 

Here’s where you can start.

• Understand that your inbox is a communication method. Right now, your inbox is more like a random drawer in your house where you keep miscellaneous items and which you never really tidy. “To get to inbox zero, you need to start treating your email as a means of communication and react to every email you get,” says Neightan White, a marketing specialist at SupremeDissertations. 
• Keep in mind that you’ll have to follow this method every day. This is not a one-time-only approach, inbox zero method is like an exercise you will have to devote your time to every day. This means that your attitude and your system have to be sustainable.
• Adopt the “clear-of-clutter” mindset. You might have noticed how a clutter on your table always distracts you from getting the job done. A cluttered inbox works the same way: the more unread and unanswered emails you have, the less productive you will be. 

The inbox zero approach is all about establishing a routine and adopting the right attitude to follow through with this routine every day.

Work out the schedule

How often should you sort your emails? When is the right time to do it?

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is sorting their emails every time they get an alert. Instead of boosting productivity, you can ruin your productivity with this method, as it interrupts your workflow. The study by the American Psychological Association has shown that multitasking like this can cost us 40% of our productivity. 

This doesn’t mean, however, that you should dedicate your evening to de-cluttering your entire inbox. There’s a chance that you won’t be done until morning, depending on how many emails you have! Instead, dedicate a few minutes every two to three hours. This should be enough to follow through with the five-step approach to cleaning your inbox that we mentioned above. 

Automate! 

Automating will help you spend less time on archiving, forwarding, and answering your emails. Thus, it will take you less time to achieve inbox zero. If you use Gmail, for example, you can create auto-replies by going into your settings and enabling templates. Next time, when you need to send an autoreply, you can create a template for it in the compose toolbar.

There are, however, quite a few things to keep in mind to make your emails look professional. First of all, you need to pay attention to the subject line and the body of your email. Your subject line should be concise but not vague, and should reflect the purpose of the email. In the body of your email, don’t write reams and reams of text – make your emails short and to the point. A few sentences is usually plenty for an email template. You can also make your emails personal to improve them. One way of doing this is by adding personal information, such as to an email signature, in case your recipient needs to respond quickly.

Getting to inbox zero also presupposes replying to urgent emails, which you will have to do every two or three hours. To speed up this process, you can download Chrome extensions like Grammarly or Easy Mail which will help you draft emails quicker and mistake-free. Making sure you can easily check emails for grammar and sentence structure will help you speed up the email writing process.

Regardless of whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail, you can also get autoreply templates from Mailbutler, which can help to automate your email management. 

Be persistent 

Working on achieving inbox zero on a daily basis brings you a lot of benefits in the long run:

• You won’t miss important emails which you might if your inbox was a huge pile of unread messages
• Recipients won’t wait to have to wait a long time for your response
• If you’re a freelancer, unread emails won’t create a bottleneck in your business

On top of that, a cluttered inbox won’t cause you unnecessary stress, and you won’t lose productivity paying attention to every email alert. Adopt the attitude that yes, it takes time and commitment to get this done, but following through every day, being consistent and persistent, will enable you to work smarter, faster, and better.

Supercharge your GTD workflow with Mailbutler

Whether it’s email, projects, or daily chores you want to regain control of, GTD is the fool-proof and most effective way to get started on your inbox zero journey.

Mailbutler‘s inbox features are powerfully designed for Apple Mail, Outlook and Gmail to help you and your team manage emails flexibly the way you want. Make use of Notes and Tasks, Snooze, and Follow-up Reminders to enhance your GTD workflow even more.

Register with Mailbutler now