Introduction & Scope

Inbox-Zero is a personal organisation method to optimize the time and energy spent on e-mails and messages, the average time to reply, the reliability.

Self organisation is the key to be considered reliable by coworkers and partners, and build trust relationships.

It is necessary to reply to e-mails & messages fast in order to avoid too slow decision-making, reading the same content several times without processing and always being preoccupied with many things in mind.

E-Mail usage should make the life easier and not make you a slave.

The article hereunder explains how you must handle your e-mails at Stockly. The Hard Rules listed in this article also apply to your Notion updates and Slack messages.

E-mails pros & cons

• Allow fast asynchronous communication.

• Keeping track of past exchange.

• Get in touch with basically anyone.

• Can be used as an Automation tool.

• Can be spammy.

• Can be time consuming. You can easily spend the whole day replying to each incoming e-mail, having an impression of working but in reality not producing real output.

• Continuous pop-up disturbing workflow.

Hard Rules for Stocklers

• Ensure that once a day, there is zero e-mail in your mailbox. All handled e-mails are whether in the archive, trash or a specific folder.
• Reply to every human. If you snooze more than 2 days, acknowledge the sender that you received their mail by replying something like ”thank you sir, let me check internally and get back to you on PRECISE_DATE”.
• Don't waste time on prospectus e-mails and random irrelevant E-mails: unsubscribe or use a rejection template.
  • Rejection template example
• Reply fast but correctly: no spelling mistake in external e-mails, no dummy replies.

Best Practices

For once in a day your main Inbox should have zero mail. That means that every e-mail is handled maximum 24 hours after you receive it, which is amazingly pleasant for the sender.

To achieve that:

• Process e-mails periodically throughout the day (i.e. once, twice or at max. three times). Keep your Mailbox shut down with no notifications, except at specific times, unless you need something very specific that needs to be done. Example of a good rhythm: Login to your mailbox twice a day (30 min in the morning and 30 min in the afternoon, that's enough to filter) and empty your mailbox at those times only.
• While handling e-mails, first delete or archive as many new messages as possible. Then deal with the mails which are not directly related to you i.e. they just need to be forwarded to the right person. Then the e-mails which would take less than 2 minutes to reply, and then the others.
• If you can't reply to a message right away there are several options:
  1. Snooze it for the right date. If it's 3 days away or more, send an acknowledgement mail first.
  2. Add an activity on your CRM if it's a subject that you usually track on it. If it's something to do, add a task on your to-do list / an event in your calendar to do it, depending on your usual way to organise your tasks.
  3. Ask yourself if it's really useful to dig. Maybe you don’t know what to reply because it's nice but useless. In that case, filter out nicely, and keep your mind clear for important stuff.
• Reply Fast. The idea is to ensure one does not overthink too much before replying to an e-mail and use the features discussed here to ensure the e-mail is dealt in a fast yet correct way.