Easier Than Zero Inbox

Just found out yesterday, I could do this one thing that erased a lot of anxiety and improved my email productivity by 10x:

Mark read for ALL

That’s it. No need to be torn apart about whether to delete certain emails.

Zero inbox is an urban legend for GTD (get-things-done) productivity hackers. We all try it. Few have succeeded. I moved from Gmail to Proton 10 years ago, hoping that a clean slate would help me fix this.

It didn’t. My Proton inbox still had 1,400+ unread emails, a signal that I just gave up.

I’ve been vibe-coding on a comments plug-in and spun up a Ubunto virtual machine on Linode Singapore as a runner for some GitHub automations. It will send me an email for every new comment received on my sites, such as Digital Sovereignty Chronicle or Herbert Yang’s blog, to allow me to respond right away.

So it became important to me again to get rid of that annoying red dot for unread emails on iPhone screen.

After marking all unread emails as read, I can process new emails with better discipline - either trashing them, archiving them, or unsubscribing from the mailing list.

Deleting emails is really hard, especially for existing ones. It calls for a systematic, holistic, methodical approach. It could involve a few dedicated hours of clean-up.

I could never find those few hours.

Deleting incremental new emails is considerably easier. For the old ones, just let them sit there. There is usually no pressing urgency to sort them out anyway.

But no more red dots in the last ten minutes. Nobody loves me anymore? 😓🤔☹️🙄