For the first time in more than ten years, my email inbox is empty. It’s the beginning of an attempt to be more proactive with my correspondence. Zeroing out means that it’ll be a lot tougher for mail to slip through the cracks, something that I’ll admit has happened many times in the past.
I’ve been routing all of my accounts through Gmail for the last few years to combat spam, so messages can drop off the front page rather quickly (even when showing a hundred items at a time). From now on, any message that comes in will be responded to immediately, flagged for followup or deleted. This isn’t a complete solution, but it’s a decent starting point that will evolve over time. For more advanced techniques, check out Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero, a compilation of strategies for dealing with large quantities of email.