I have been a practitioner of Inbox Zero for the past few months. It has gone a long way towards successfully keeping up with multiple Fedora mailings lists without drowning. Peace and sanity now reign in my personal and work inboxes. Some weeks things get out of hand, but that good feeling always sets in again when the count for my inbox is less than five, ideally zero.

One of the aims of Inbox Zero is to remove the distractions and wasted time caused by email. How much time do you waste every day switching to your email client to see if that exhilarating email that will change the rest of your day has arrived?

My favorite feature so far in Thunderbird 2.0 is the ability to mark folders as Favorite. Using the view/folders/favorite menu selection I hide every folder except the folders designated as favorite. These include: my inbox, and one or two other folders which have a high likelihood of containing something I would need to respond to in the next 24 hours. All mail that doesn’t need to be read within twenty-four hours goes to a sub folder. This includes most mailing lists and people with a high likelihood of sending spam.

Blissfully unaware, mail piles up in the hundreds until the next delete, delete, delete sweep-through of all the un-favorite folders.

UPDATE (2009-01-14): Merlin did a good video presentation and slides on Inbox Zero at Google.