I enjoyed Merlin Man’s recent podcast on inbox zero from his visit to Google. The basic idea of inbox zero is that the best way to manage email is to clean out your inbox at least every day. Those emails that can be deleted get deleted, those that need action either get immediate action or go onto into your GTD (getting things done) process. This generally seems like a good idea to me and I have been trying to implement that personally.

As I thought about Merlin’s podcast it occurred to me that one mechanism that I use in my process that I would argue for is contextual inboxes (for lack of a better name). The idea is this: when you are cooking in your kitchen and you realize you are using the last egg, you don’t immediately stop what you are doing and then run to the store because you know that you would have to go again in 15 minutes when you use the last of the juice and then again later on in the evening when you run out of ice cream. Instead you write what you need on your grocery list and get a number of things all at the same time. In part this is because the context switch of finding your car keys, driving to the store getting eggs takes too much time. I find as I manage my inbox that there are categories of email for me that are similar. So for instance, when I get someone who sends me an email about travel news I read it but immediately file it in a folder of travel news. When I am recording my podcast (Amateur Traveler) and get to the time where I need some travel news stories I process these stories at that time. I do this because the context switch involves breaking out the microphone, starting a podcast blog entry, etc.

I think when we can identify sets of task that are context appropriate, that we can to more efficiently if we wait and do them in a specific place or at a specific time then this is a great place to use a special inbox.

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