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Inbox zero

Do you ever feel overloaded with work? That there’s so much to do that sometimes nothing gets done? These are common feelings and they’re often linked to an overloaded inbox. 

We’re constantly bombarded with notifications and little red badges with ever increasing numbers. It gets worse with every new app that we download. For the unread counts you’re either one of two types of people: Your count is +9999 or 0. This article is for you +9999 people that are crying for help.

Feeder is always working on new tools to help you work more efficiently. We strongly believe the Inbox zero philosophy, where you always strive to have 0 as the unread count after a work session. 

Does that mean you need to read everything that comes in? Of course not. It just means that you’ve triaged all the work you have in front of you. After that you can actually start ticking off the important work. This philosophy applies to your feed reader as well as your e-mail inbox, or anything really that has an unread count.

Inbox zero means being harsh about what “unread” means. In Feeder, that’s the items that are marked as NEW. Unread should mean that you have yet to triage it. Once it’s triaged it shouldn’t be in your inbox anymore. After your triage session, everything will be neatly organized.

How to accomplish inbox zero in Feeder

  1. Open the Feeder app of choice and go to the unread tab. 
  2. Give it a brief scroll through and see if anything is really urgent. 
  3. Once all the fires are out, you simply start from the top. Navigate using the keyboard commands or simply scroll through your list. 
  4. Any items that are important: star them or add them to a collection
  5. Once all important items are starred, right click and mark everything as read. Inbox zero!
  6. To make things even easier, Feeder also supports Rules to mark as read. In your feeds there might be some things that you never want to be marked as unread. Simply create a rule to mark those as read automatically based on their keywords.

Now you can open your starred posts or collection and start reading what’s important. Your goal then becomes to empty that list. Once that’s empty you know you’ve done everything that you need to do for the day. Go home, relax, and know that you haven’t missed anything important during the day.

Sometimes you’ll slip from your inbox zero streak. The unreads will pile up all over again and you’ll start feeling overwhelmed. At this point it’s time to start fresh. Give your unread list a quick scroll, make sure you’re not missing anything super important, and then mark as read.

What type of inboxer are you? +9999 or inbox zero? Let us now at the hashtag #inboxzero

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