Ahh, the mythical inbox zero.

Are you overwhelmed by email? Hundreds of emails a day and you simply can’t respond to all of them? You might believe you’re overwhelmed, but instead, you’ve stopped taking charge of your email and let it overtake you.

I’m a blogger, active in social media, and most importantly, a startup founder (and sole employee, wearing the designer, salesperson, marketing, and developer hats all at once), and I try to never forget to respond to an email. Here’s how I’ve arranged my email so I achieve inbox-zero every day.

(I wish I was awesome enough to think of all these myself, but @shazow takes the credit for teaching me most of these.)

Use Gmail

Gmail is the best email provider out there, due to their superior spam filtering (absolutely crucial) as well as the amount of tools they provide for email management.

This doesn’t mean you have to have a @gmail.com email address — I use Gmail for both my @limedaring.com and @weddingtype.com email addresses. It’s simple to set up Gmail so you can receive and send email using a different domain.

Note: I know priority inbox exists, but I’ve found this system to be superior and faster for going through your emails once you have it set up.

Be aggressive about what you receive.

Is there a newsletter that you immediately delete it without reading every time it arrives? Unsubscribe from every piece of random email that you don’t read as soon as you get one. No unsubscribe link? Mark as spam and move on. Be honest with yourself — when I look at most people’s overwhelmed inboxes, it seems like half of them are random newsletters.

Label and remove from inbox all other newsletters and unimportant emails.

Inbox is empty (so I’ve taken care of important stuff), unimportant are filtered out.

Any pleasure reads and newsletters that aren’t important first thing in the day should be filtered from your inbox into a custom label. Get it out of your inbox and therefore out of the “unread” count — we’re trying to make it so your unread count is only unread important emails.

Open the email you want to filter, and under “More actions”, choose “Filter messages like these”. Create a filter that accurately grabs all current and past emails (check with “Test Search”) then choose “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” and “Apply the Label” with a label that describes the type of email.

Some of the emails I use this for: Newsletters, Twitter notifications, email groups, etc. Essentially, if you don’t need to read it, move it out of the inbox and into a waiting area where you can read at your own leisure.

Multiple inboxes + stars.

I normally have the extra inboxes showing 15 at a time, but I changed it to five just for the screenshot.

Now that unimportant, repeating emails are filtered, the goal is to go through the entire inbox of items every morning, and sort them if needed.

Gmail allows you to star items as needed, and combining this with multiple inboxes is a huge timesaver.

Pick panel titles that are descriptive. Donated goods is an inbox I set up for just this week to keep track of a promotion I’m running.

1. First, head to Gmail Labs (click the gear in the top right of Gmail, and head to “Labs”) and scroll until you see “Multiple Inboxes” and enable it.
2. Set up a system for starring. In Gmail settings in the first tab, there is a section known as “Stars”. Hover your mouse over the stars for their names (important for filters). Then choose which stars you will use for which filters: “yellow-star” as to-dos, “blue-star” as important documents, etc.
3. Since you’ve enabled multiple inboxes, head to the “Multiple Inboxes” tab in Gmail settings. There, you can add extra panes to Gmail, and assign them a search query (“has:yellow-star”) and a title (“To-do:”).
4. Now that your inboxes are set up, when you start reading your newest batch of email in the morning (the normal inbox), star appropriately and archive anything that you need to act on or keep but you aren’t going to do anything with immediately. On the Gmail home page, those archived and starred emails should appear in the lower panes so they’re still accessible, but not cluttering up your email anymore.

Use the to-do inbox liberally.

When you check your main inbox, respond to as many short things as possible, but don’t get bogged down with big responses. If there are any emails that require more than a minute of attention and response time, immediately star it with whichever star is your “to-do” star and archive. It’ll pop into your separate inbox, where, once you finished going through your incoming mail, you can pay attention to it.

The main reason this is important is so you can get an overview of your email and the tasks you need to do before diving into any of the tasks. If there is an important email hidden under some mostly-but-not-as-important emails, you’ll see it before you’ve started taking major time to respond to others. You’ll quickly know everything you need to do when you first check your email, then you prioritize which emails to act on first.

Pro tip: You can also send emails to yourself with tasks and mark as To-do, turning that pane into a complete to-do list.

Keyboard shortcuts.

Now that stars and multiple inboxes are set up, activate and learn basic Gmail keyboard shortcuts. Head back to Labs and activate “Custom keyboard shortcuts”. The basic ones I use every day are:

• “j”: Next email in the inbox.
• “k”: Previous email in the inbox.
• ”[“: Archive current email and go to the next email in the inbox (most used).
• ”]”: Archive current email and go to the previous email in the inbox.

Now when you’re opening your email for the first time in the morning, click the top one, read quickly, and decide whether to archive it immediately or star it and archive it for later (or unsubscribe or set up a new filter). Start clearing out your inbox by starring as needed, responding quickly to other emails, and clicking “[” as needed to move through your emails as fast as possible.

Use canned responses to respond to and write emails quickly.

I manually approve every account on WeddingInviteLove, meaning I send a lot of account approved (and unapproved) emails every week. To make things faster, I have basic templates I’ve set up where the majority of the email is filled in, with spots to add personal details if needed. A serious time-saver, if you find yourself writing the same email over and over.

Yet another Google Labs feature, under “Canned Responses”.

Last and most important step.

Once you have everything set up correctly and you’re facing your inbox of 3000 unread emails, start at the top. Use keyboard shortcuts to go through the emails quickly, unsubscribing from things you forgot to from before, responding to things that only need 30 seconds of attention, starring things that need more, and archiving anything important but needing no response. Do this as long as you wish.

Once you’re exhausted, select everything in your inbox and mark as read and archive all.

If there is something important in there, it’s already buried so deep that you won’t find it anyways. If someone wants a response, they will email you again, and at that point, your inbox should be way less scary and you can actually respond promptly.

DON’T ignore this step. It’s imperative that you start from a blank slate so it’s easier to not fall behind.

Bonus: Use Rapportive for information on those emailing you.

One of the best Gmail plugins out there (disclaimer: I freelanced with Rapportive and designed their website back in the day.) Don’t know who’s emailing you? Let Rapportive pull up their picture, company, Twitter/Facebook profiles, and other information. Doesn’t help you go through your email, but makes your important emails hold more data. Great for at-a-glance information.

Any other tips? I’ve love to hear about them — comment, or email me at tracy@limedaring.com (and you already know I’ll respond to you ;) ).

Hacker News discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702089

Enjoy this post? Follow me on Twitter for more tips (scattered between jokes, funny pictures, and entrepreneurship insights).

Say hello to the final product, WeddingInviteLove. It’s not too complex, code-wise: I deliberately chose something that would be rather simple to get myself off the ground. This web app was a departure from my earlier project, WeddingType, where I launched my cofounder search on Hacker News in August, found a cofounder, started building the product, applied to Y Combinator for Winter 2011, got an interview, was turned down, and decided to part ways from the cofounder. I’m still planning on launched WeddingType, but if was going to learn how to code, I would have to take baby steps first — thus, WeddingInviteLove.

Working on a different idea, but not pivoting.

If your idea doesn’t initially work out, try working on a related project that’ll enhance your original idea while keeping your enthusiasm for the area. Both WeddingType and WeddingInviteLove are in the same space — wedding invitations — but catering to two different types of customers. WeddingType, the invitation typography generator, is for non-designer couples looking for a save some money by creating their own invitations. WeddingInviteLove is a directory of boutique wedding invitation designers, for couples who are looking to spend more for a professional and higher quality. They both increase my prominence and reach within the wedding invitation industry, but also avoid poaching customers from eachother.

Take advantage of help.

Why did I choose Python and Django over Ruby or any other programming language? I needed to take advantage of the resources I had, mainly, @shazow, my bf who’s an expert in Python but specializes in Pylons, a different framework. I’ve heard a lot of quality discussions between Pylons and Django, but for me, Django has a lot more hand-holding than other frameworks and a lot of tutorials online. For nitty-gritty Django questions that Andrey couldn’t answer, I tweeted that I needed some help and got two awesome advisors, @kantrn, who I met in person several times to work out problems I was having, and @kennethlove, who I’d IM at all points in the night for help with specific bugs. I also used @kennethlove’s screencast blog tutorial, since I could relate it directly to my project — profiles on WeddingInviteLove are like blog posts on a blog, I just simply changed some names around. All code was written by myself while taking advantage of the numerous Django applications such as django-registration.

Build the web app first, then design it.

It was tempting to build the entire interface first but I deliberately ignored the design until I had things 90% working. This got me to constantly work on the code before working on the “fun stuff”, plus encouraged me to launch quickly since as soon as the code was finished, all I had to do was quickly “skin” it before getting it live with the assumption that I would be iterating on the design after it launches. Also, if I needed to abandon the project due to some insurmountable code problem, the time wasted wouldn’t include the time spent on design.

Launch as fast as possible.

Nothing kills a new idea better than taking too much time on it. There are thousands of things more that I could have done to improve WeddingInviteLove before I launched it, but getting it out and generating feedback was much, much more important. I don’t mean you should launch an incomplete project, but pare down your features to the very minimum and get it live as fast as possible.

One problem I faced was convincing designers to sign up before the site was live, so I created three fake profiles and emailed 10+ designers with screenshots of the homepage and future profile pages, explaining that I was building it for fun and it would be free to list them. It’s a win-win scenario for the designers and myself, but emailing out of the blue can look shady. One designer replied that my email looked like spam, but the professional design in the screenshot I linked convinced her to sign up anyways. My design meant the difference between someone ignoring my email versus taking it more seriously.

Once the website received its first 3 profiles, I got it live (on Dotcloud), but continued to email designers directly, now pointing to the live site. Overall, I emailed 67 designers directly (see screenshot), with an approximate 50% response rate and slightly less sign-up rate.

The “real” launch — landing a major blog post.

I was up to about 20 designers (not that big of a deal to any potential customer looking for a full fledged directory), when I traveled to New York and decided to chat up one of my favorite design bloggers, Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swiss Miss). The tactic of traveling and emailing someone “famous” randomly in that area and inviting them to lunch has worked well in the past (I landed a guest spot on The Big Web Show after inviting Jeffery Zeldman for lunch). After the lunch I was able to show her WeddingInviteLove and got some great feedback, all I was expecting and hoping from the visit. Awesomely, after I left, WeddingInviteLove was blogged about on Swiss Miss. Getting profiled on one of the best design blogs out there was the best beginner boost that I could ask for, launching a trend of blog posts and tweets, and landing WeddingInviteLove another 60 designers to a total of 83, a week after the Swiss Miss blog post.

Future monetization.

I get asked a lot on how I’ll monetize. I have no intention of ever taking away free profiles, charging customers to search, or acting as a middleman and taking commission. My current plan is to launch pro profiles, with support for more portfolio images and other features for every upgraded profile. Before I can launch this, however, I have to get more links and traffic to ensure a pro profile is “worth it” to designers, so I’ve been focusing on promotion for the last few weeks.

Conclusion.

• If you’re a designer, picking up development looks really tough, but stick it out for a couple of months — being enabled with the ability of creating your vision is worth it .
• If you’re learning a new language, don’t do tutorials verbatim — take what they’re teaching, apply it to a different product, and you will learn a lot faster.
• Launch as fast as possible, since feedback on the product is the most important.
• Don’t be afraid of asking “big wigs” for their advice — buying someone’s lunch is a small price to pay for knowledgable feedback.
• Ask for help as much as possible and wherever you can find it.

Follow me on Twitter at @limedaring. Any feedback, opinions, and advice happily encouraged at tracy@limedaring.com.

Personal homepages are tough, especially when you’re not designing for yourself, but rather, for another. We worked together to create a personal solution that was both professional and personal, highlighting her work at IBM as well as her numerous media appearances. Great collaboration, and I’m happy that I was able to work with her!

Written in Django and hosted on DotCloud, it helped teach me how to develop a webapp and now I’m learning a lot about website management and advertising. Really fun and useful experiment!

Homepage design was a collaboration between myself and my partner-in-arms, Andrey — he provided the idea for the awesome component highlighting that you can’t see in the screenshot (check it out on the live homepage).

It was a small project, a one page website revolving around highlighting the food available for ordering as well as highlighting current clients and their great reviews.

Andrey and I have a panel up for voting for SXSWi 2011. Andrey quit his job to start his own Y Combinator backed company, and I quit my job to freelance (successfully) and am now in the process of starting my own job. Vote for us! We’d love to share what we’ve learned.

Check out the panel submission and (please) vote for us!

We decided on a non-traditional layout for the homepage, with the second most important page being the jobs page. Everything came out wonderfully. Very quick turn around time, high attention to detail, and a smart and forgiving client. Great project.

Hi, my name is Tracy. The wedding industry is huge, overpriced, and with insane profit margins. I’m looking to disrupt it with WeddingType.

In wedding invitations alone, there are two options: spend hundreds of dollars for custom designed invitations (expensive but pretty), or do-it-yourself (cheap but ugly). I want to build a web application catering to the price sensitive couples who have an aversion to Comic Sans.

A do-it-yourself wedding invitation kit costs $45, while professional wedding invitations are hundreds or thousands of dollars. With WeddingType, the service will guide the user through a constrained flow of inputs which will populate a set of pre-designed templates with professional typography that they can print out and get hitched. The completely automated service will charge $25 and send the user a PDF by email.

My goal is to get this out really fast and start making revenue from the start, then see how big we can grow it. From here, there are multiple ways of increasing value and revenue — licensing to wedding invitation template manufacturers, selling custom design solutions, offering templates through the site, etc. Large scale, could sell templates through the site, printing and mailing like Moo.com.

Current landing page of WeddingType

I freelanced and worked at a startup for five years as the primary designer/jack-of-all-trades for everything relating to their web properties, including analytics, usability, design, HTML/CSS, and multivariate/AB testing. I need a technical partner who is enthusiastic about the business and a web programming whiz. Preferably in the Bay Area, and if everything goes right, we’ll apply to Y Combinator for the next Winter session.

Intrigued? I’d love to meet you, perhaps work on a small project together.

Find out more about me:

• http://limedaring.com
• @limedaring
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/tracyosborn

Ping me at tracy@limedaring.com if you’re interested in my idea and would like to meet for coffee to discuss!

Post a screenshot or photo of your name (or screen name) doodled. Here’s mine, for reference:

I did mine really quick, and I don’t want anyone to spend too much time on this. But have some fun sketching out your name and do something fun with it. :) Post a comment here, ping me on Twitter, or email me at tracy@limedaring.com.

I’ll announce my favorites on Friday, June 4th.

Holy crap, that was a lot of cool invites! I kind of regret doing this contest, since all that entered deserve an invite, and I only have two. Here are the entries I received:

Alexander

Andrew - WINNER

April Mains

Jacob - WINNER

Jonny

Maximilian

Mushroom

n0s0ap

Oriol

My two personal favorites are Jacob and Andrew, and I will be contacting them for their email addresses. If you didn’t win, if I get more invites I’ll come here first, and I’ll let others who have invites to pick from these awesome submissions as well. :)