I achieved inbox zero at work last year and have kept it that way for six months now. Gmail made it possible and I now replicate a Gmail setup on Outlook. I have two rules that I live by.

1. Don’t decide, archive.

If there’s no obvious action from an email, there’s only one other action. I don’t even decide if I should archive or delete, I just archive the lot. Time and mind are expensive; storage is cheap.

1. No yucky little bold numbers.

There are a handful of lists and notifications that I filter into folders for later browsing, but everything that is not in the Inbox gets marked as read, so I won’t have yucky little bold numbers glaring at me whenever I work on email. This has worked miracles for my Zen and my concentration.

Merlin has mentioned both of these strategies, but for me they were the key mindsets that made everything else possible.