How to stop using your inbox as a todo list

Most people’s real todo list is their inbox. Unread messages are tasks, flagged messages are important tasks, and emails sent to yourself are notes. It works, right up until it does not: the inbox grows, the flags multiply, and a task from three weeks ago is somewhere under four hundred newsletters.

The inbox is good at receiving. It is bad at remembering.

Why the inbox fails as a task list

• Other people decide what is on it. Every incoming message competes with your actual priorities.
• Messages are not tasks. One email can contain three tasks, or none. The subject line rarely says what you need to do.
• There are no real dates. Flags and snoozes help, but most inboxes have no notion of “due Thursday” that you can see across everything.
• It is noisy to review. Looking for your tasks means reading through everything else.

The two-step way out

You do not need inbox zero or a weekend of sorting. You need two habits.

Step one: when an email contains a task, write the task elsewhere. One line, in your own words, with a date:

Send Q3 numbers to Dana by thursday 10am #finance

Then archive the email. If you need it later, search finds it. The approach is described in more detail in how to turn emails into tasks.

Step two: stop emailing yourself. When you have a thought, capture it directly instead of composing a message to your own address. With a global capture key it is faster than email anyway. In Jot it is Ctrl + Shift + J, a line, Ctrl + Enter, and focus returns to whatever you were in.

Deal with the backlog last

Do not start by processing the old inbox. Start with new mail, for a week, using the two steps above. Once the habit is working, take the oldest flagged or unread messages and do a fast pass: capture the real tasks, archive the rest. If the backlog is huge, accept that some of it has expired; see task bankruptcy.

Keep the inbox for what it is good at

The inbox remains the right place for conversation and reference. Read, reply, file. The tasks live on a list with dates, and the list is what you look at when you decide what to do next. For things you are waiting on from other people, a separate list with chase dates works better than flagged sent mail; see how to track what you are waiting on.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.