Outlook hacks for a nominal zero inbox

So, in the past few months I have been approaching an inbox with zero size more and more often. It’s not because I don’t send or receive a lot of mail, either. I have, on average, 135 messages from real people a day (I get a lot more from alerts and system bots for the production systems I help manage).  On the send side, I dish out, on average, 66 e-mails a day (max of 123). Gosh… I’m chatty!

Here is a graph of my Read folder counts per day since January:

Here is my sent item count since January:

I wrote a variation of my Move to Read macro to do the counting.

The way I go through and get my inbox empty is through a combination of techniques. Since Outlook is my tool, much of what I do leverages its features and I sprinkle common sense in as needed. For this post, I figured I would jot down some quick notes on what I do on a daily basis.

• If I can do something right away, I do it. The whole Getting Things Done philosophy.
• If I can’t do something right away, I flag items for follow-up. No dates,  just flags.
• I make my default inbox a search folder, and call it incoming. This folder only shows me items in my inbox that are not flagged for follow-up. The effect is that if I flag an item, it disappears from this view.
• I created a macro called MoveToRead, which I wrote about before. I map this to ALT+S so I can click on an item with my right h and (mouse) and spirit it away with my other hand (keyboard).
• I configure my inbox by conversation (but frequently flip back to chronological). Conversation view allows me to delete (or MoveToRead) many related messages at once. grouping by subject is also useful.
• I go through flagged items and do one of two things. If it’s work for one of the projects I’m on, I create a story and enter it in the systems we use. This translates an inbox item into a real project work item. From there, it will be naturally delegated or assigned to myself.
• I carefully auto-archive mail. I create a PST file per year and store these locally. I back up my previous years PST’s onto the fileserver.
• I keep the last 2 years of mails online and opened in outlook so search can index them.
• I use the Find feature in Outlook 2007 a lot since it’s fast enough for me.
• I liberally use search terms such as “to:bill, “from:alice”, “subject:whitepaper” and some of the aggregate stuff like “quotes” and the AND keyword to make sure I find the right message.
• I create Rules for all of the crap I don’t want in my inbox. Each rule is for a different piece of daily alerts from vendors, systems alerts, etc.
• I frequently visit “Unread Items” which usually has all of the alert stuff and group by “Sender” this allows me to bulk read/dash away a whole category of alert in seconds.
• I read msnbc news and internal blogs this way as  the sender is always grouped and easy to follow. I hit Ctrl+Q to mark groups of messages as read and they disappear from Unread Mail search folder.

So, as I write this I have zero unread items, zero items in my dynamic “Incoming” folder, and 12 messages flagged for follow-up.

What tricks do you employ?