Depending on the role I’m in, the volume of mail and messages coming at me can vary massively. In the last few years I’ve averaged around 500 emails a day, plus innumerable instant messages. Over time I’ve developed a way of working where I aim for “Inbox Zero” whenever I can.

As ever, I’m not particularly religious about following the full GTD process. Instead, I’ve evolved my own approach.

So, back to the never-ending inbox. I find email falls into four rough categories: things that can be automated away, automated messages to glance at, circulars that need reading, and emails that require action.

A large chunk of my messages are automated updates telling me something has happened. They’re generated by a system and don’t need any direct input from me. I think of them as a heartbeat. If they’ve arrived, that’s all I need to know. Some of these I’ve written automations for, pulling information from the email and storing it to build knowledge over time. For example, if a daily job runs and emails me, I log when and how long it took in a spreadsheet to spot patterns. More than once this has helped me catch jobs that were slowly creeping later and longer and needed attention. Ideally, modern engineering teams would catch this through logging and alerting, but not every system is shiny and new. These emails never make it to my eyes; once they’re logged, they’re deleted.

The next group is also automated, but I’ll just glance at these and archive them immediately. This probably makes up the majority of my inbox and takes seconds a day to clear.

As an aside, I’ve used keyboard shortcuts for years to blast through email with minimal effort. On my Mac, Ctrl‑E archives an email and marks it as read. I never use folders for anything. If I need to find something, I rely on search.

Then there are the “information” emails every organisation sends out. They often get pushback from people, but it really doesn’t take much effort to read them and tuck the key points away for later. It’s surprising how much you can piece together from team updates, business news, supplier briefings, newsletters and so on. I’ll admit that if I’m really busy I might skip some, but generally I try to scan them.

Finally, we get to emails that need action. These are the smallest category – maybe 5% of my inbox – but they account for 80% of the time I spend managing email. If I can deal with it immediately, I do. If I need to think, do some work, ask someone else to do something, or wait for another event, then the email stays in my inbox as a marker. Messages from other sources go into my To Do list.

The goal is always zero To Dos and an empty inbox. It never happens. My rule of thumb is simple: if I need to scroll through the inbox, I’m too busy and need to turn up the effort to get things back under control.

What I will never tolerate is unread messages. I always mark emails as read so I know where I stand. When I see thousands of unread emails on other people’s devices, it makes me twitch. Each to their own, I suppose.

As for applications, I’m not particularly fussy. In corporates it’s almost always Microsoft; smaller organisations tend to use Google. At home I use Apple kit. For what it’s worth, on my own devices I use Spark for email, plus Apple Calendar and Reminders for my To Do lists.

I’m always curious about better ways of working. What’s your system?