I'm usually pretty insistent on maintaining Inbox Zero with my email account, so using it as my to do list also encourages me to get everything I need to get done, done.
But some days I just get slammed with emails from my eVSM colleagues, as well as customer support issues, on top of my usual list of subscription emails. My inbox ends up with a lot more than zero emails in it.
So I have started using the Mailbox app, which is awesome. It will "snooze" an email until a time/day you specify, with a buttery smooth user interface. I actually had a similar system in place that I had put together using Google Apps Script, but it required me to move items into different named folders (like 'wait 1 day', 'wait 1 week', etc...). Mailbox lets me just move something to:
- Later Today (3 hours later, I believe)
- This Evening
- Tomorrow (Morning)
- This Weekend
- Next Week
- Next Month
- Someday (not sure when that is - 3 months?)
- or a specific Date/Time
and at that time, Mailbox will move the email back to my inbox. Until then, it's hidden in a Gmail folder.
So now when my inbox is flooded with emails, I just open the app up and start snoozing emails and clearing the inbox. It's pretty easy to pick these different snooze times so that the emails come back in the order I want to work on them. And sometimes when an email comes back, I snooze it again immediately.
But this app provides a beautifully easy way for me to not only keep my inbox (and my mind) clear of clutter, but also makes it really easy for me to follow up on emails weeks later, when there is zero chance I'd remember to do it myself.
I find myself much more capable at focusing on my work when I only have one or two or three tasks looking at me in my email inbox, rather than trying to constantly re-sort all those emails in my head when I check my email. It would be nice if I could snooze emails from my email client, or even a web app, but I'm fine with using one of my iOS gadgets to do it.
