It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed these days. Near-constant streams of incoming information and objects are rendering not just our email account(s), but our homes, cars and brains into inboxes. Luckily, Merlin Mann created Inbox Zero – a philosophy for dealing with informational buildup and redirecting your mental energy – which can help you cope with all the clutter. When you keep an inbox free of tasks to be done by completing them when you receive them, you free up your attention for the things that really matter to you. Finding comfort in zero, both inside and outside the email inbox, could be your ticket to a clearer mind and schedule. And who couldn’t use more time and energy to devote to the important things in life?

The roots of Inbox Zero lie in David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. GTD is a way of dealing with both input and output that helps organize and prioritize tasks and create proportional responses. It encourages thinking of an inbox as a collection of immediately actionable items – a medium for communicating and completing tasks, not a catalog. Basically, it says that an inbox should not be a to-do list. It should be a tool for processing what you need to do.

If you balance your checkbook, you’re already familiar with zero being a good thing. To take that a step further, you could create a zero budget. By transferring your incoming money among checking, savings and retirement accounts, allotting it to each of your essential expenses and eliminating the unnecessary ones, you could account for (i.e., process) all of your income. And by accounting for all of your money, you won’t have to think or worry about it again until you receive more.

When’s the last time your inbox looked like this?

Beyond email and money, Inbox Zero can be implemented just about anywhere. Designate your problem areas – places where things stack up – as inboxes to be kept clear of distraction. If you find yourself with piles of stuff constantly taking up residence in the same spots in your home, your car or your handbag, taking a few moments to filter out the items that need to be processed and then taking care of them will keep your mind free to deal with the things that require more brain power. If you tossed a flyer about a new yoga class into your bag on your way out of the gym, put a little thought into whether you’re going to sign up for the class when you unpack your bag. If you know you’re not going to sign up, recycle the flyer. If you want to take the class, do what’s required to sign up, note the date and time in your calendar, then recycle the flyer.

The best way to start with Inbox Zero is starting at zero. This may be time intensive! At home, it could mean dumping out your briefcase or clearing off your table. In your email inbox, it means moving all of your email out of your inbox, into a separate folder. In both cases, as you look at each item you’ve moved out of the inbox, you should determine what you need to do to process it and then actually process it. And then keep going until there’s nothing left to process.

Everyone will have their own method for clearing out their three-dimensional inboxes, but there are a few tools that anyone can use to manage their email. Take a few minutes to evaluate the emails you’re receiving. Do you need to be alerted every time the furniture store has a sale, or can you check out the store’s website when you actually need furniture? That’s probably an email you can safely unsubscribe from. If you’re finding yourself merely glancing at emails from a particular source, let it go.

Setting up filters for bacn (the emails that fall somewhere between spam and meaningful communication) can really help. Do you need to know that someone commented on your Facebook status or added a reply to a forum thread you’re watching the moment it happens? Probably not. Setting up a filter to funnel those messages into a folder separate from your inbox will keep them available, but not up front and demanding your attention. (See the sidebar for a few how-to resources.)

An “email sprint” is a great way to steer yourself toward the bigger tasks at hand, and it’s as simple as turning your email off for an hour. No notifications, no open client, no checking your phone. Use the attention you’d be paying to your email for the important stuff. After an hour, reopen your email and process what’s arrived. When you get back down to zero, close your email again for another hour.

Don’t let an invitation hang around in your inbox. Save the details in your calendar and then delete it. Photo uploaded to Flickr by: Sarah Parrott, some rights reserved

If you find that you send the same responses over and over to emails that require little thought to process, write some canned responses that you can save in a document on your hard drive. When you start your email sprint, keep that file close at hand.

Take advantage of your organizational tools. If you receive an invitation to an event, respond to the invite and note the details in your calendar, then delete the email. If a family member sends you a link to a site or article that doesn’t require your immediate attention, click through and bookmark it so you can come back to it when you’ve got some free time, then delete the email. If a friend sends you their new mailing address or phone number via email, record it in your electronic or paper address book, then delete the email. Sensing a theme here?

Being comfortable with an empty inbox, whatever shape that inbox takes, is a challenge. Multitasking isn’t just a buzzword in job listings anymore – it’s a way of life. Just the sight of an empty inbox may take some getting used to, and getting to zero may be time consuming. But the effort spent learning the process and making it second nature will more than pay itself back. With the obstacles to your attention removed, you can spend more attention on family, friends and the projects that are most important to you.

Additional resources

Watch a video of Merlin Mann explaining the concepts behind Inbox Zero to the team at Google.

Find instructions on setting up:

Gmail folders and filters
Outlook folders and rules
Yahoo folders and filters
Hotmail folders and rules
Mac Mail mailboxes and filters

The year is a quarter over—have you kept your New Year’s resolution?

Nearly 2,100 New Balance fans shared their resolutions with us in January as part of a contest to win a pair of NB Minimus or 890s. If, like more than a quarter of contest participants, you resolved to lose weight, is the scale still going down? Or if, like more than 170 entrants, you vowed to run a half or full marathon, are you tackling ever-increasing distances?

If you’re losing steam, you’re not alone. A host of studies has shown that about a third of people abandon their resolutions before January is even over.

But there’s good news! Research has also revealed that just making a resolution at all puts you way ahead of the curve. In two studies at the University of Scranton, 40 to 46 percent of New Year’s resolvers were successful at the six-month mark. When you compare that to the zero to four percent of non-resolvers who went on to make positive changes, it’s pretty impressive.

Think about where your goals stand today. If the resolutions you made in January haven’t quite rooted, or even if you didn’t make one at all, take a look at the following questions and see if you can figure out what adjustments might help you achieve the changes you’re looking for. Now is the perfect time to do a quick assessment and make some course corrections to get yourself on track.

Do you feel overwhelmed?

Many resolutions fail because they’re too ambitious, psychologists say. Maybe you’re tackling too many things at once. Did you vow, for instance, to lose 25 pounds, run a half marathon and pay off all your debt? Narrowing your list to just one of those things will lessen your chances of getting overwhelmed and throwing the whole lot out the window. Try assigning yourself a single goal for the next couple months and reassess the rest of your list once you’ve met it.

Next, make sure your goal is something you can actually achieve. Lose 10 pounds by the weekend? Not healthy. Train like Jackie Joyner-Kersee? Unlikely—after all, she was a professional. Never eat chocolate again? That’s crazy talk! Walk for 20 minutes three times a week? You can do that!

And the more specific you are, the better your chances for success. We loved contest participant Alex H.’s resolution to “start running away from fast food” (like more than 100 others who wanted to eat healthier), and Suzanne G.’s vow to “get my butt back.” But accomplishing those fabulous goals will require doing more specific things—like making the time to pack a lunch daily or doing 200 squats a week. A study (pdf) in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Compass suggests that it’s also helpful to be specific about when you’re going to do these things. For instance, exercise on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays right after work. Or reorganize one messy closet shelf every Sunday.

Are you finding it hard to get motivated?

The same study in Personality and Social Psychology Compass points out that if you’re someone who loves to sleep late, resolving to get up early to exercise will leave you frustrated. Similarly, if you live and die for Jon Hamm, you shouldn’t resolve to go to Weight Watchers meetings when Mad Men is on. In both of these cases, your motivation to sleep or drool at the TV may be higher than your motivation to stick to the resolution. Contest participants Mary B. (“walk to the grocery store for one or two items”), Eva A. (“take the stairs at work”) and Tee T. (“add on 15 minutes to my workouts”) have the right idea: since they’re altering activities they’d already be doing, they’ll be more likely to stay motivated.

Photo uploaded to Flickr by: smith_cl9, some rights reserved

Another great motivator? Peer pressure! The more people who are aware of your goals, the more accountability you’ll feel. A Quirkology study of 3,000 people found that this is especially true of women, who were much more likely to stick to their resolutions when they told their friends and family members about them. Also, working out with a friend has been shown to vastly increase the chances that you’ll do it. The same goes for almost any resolution. If you haven’t been motivated to cook at home by yourself, start a dinner group and hit the farmers market with your friends, then make a social event out of preparing healthy dishes from those fresh ingredients.

The Happiness Project
by Gretchen Rubin

Are you all about instant gratification?

If, like most of us, you like to see results immediately, you might be more successful if you break your resolution into steps and give yourself rewards along the way. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in England, led a 700-person study about keeping New Year’s resolutions. A common factor among those who succeeded? They broke down their goals into smaller segments. If your goal—like dozens of the NB fans who submitted their resolutions—is to lose 20 (or 30, or 50) pounds this year, you might instead aim to lose eight pounds in two months. And when you reach that goal? Treat yourself to a new pair of jeans as a reward and incentive to keep going.

Another way to see your progress is to literally put it somewhere where you can see it. In her book The Happiness Project, author Gretchen Rubin says she’s never been more successful at sticking to resolutions than when she measured her progress on a chart. She looked at it every day and put either a check mark (if she kept to her resolution) or an X (if she ignored her resolution).

Do you get frustrated when you experience a setback?

Don’t give up—even if the Xes on your chart are starting to outnumber the checks. The Quirkology study mentioned above found that women are more likely than men to give up if they slip and revert to old habits. However, the study also found that when women are encouraged to view lapses as merely temporary setbacks and to persist, they are 10% more likely to succeed.

As Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”

Or, as NB contest participant Kelly P. said, “Stop making excuses and RUN, RUN, RUN!”

Have you kept your New Year’s resolution? We’d love to know your secrets: how do you keep motivated?