How To Take Control Of Your Inbox (Inbox Zero)

Email overwhelm needs no introduction.

Most of the time, our inbox is a pain in the a** to-do list that we can’t be bothered dealing with, but it’s a necessary evil if we want to work collaboratively, so we’re told.

But rather than stacking up to triple or quad digit unopened numbers, there’s an easy way to deal with this shitshow.

It’s called ‘Inbox Zero’. Here are the rules.

1. Check your emails once per day. Or twice if you want to kill time
2. Deal with each email once
3. Action emails that take less than 2 minutes immediately
4. Task and remove every other email

Check Once, why? Because task switching is expensive, and emails are someone else’s plan, not yours.

Deal with them once. Why? Well, why open an email if you’re not going to do anything with it. Surely it’s not that fun? Deal with them once and be gone.

Action emails, why? Instead of building up a nagging to-do list, this rule will keep only important shit on your to-do list. If it only takes two minutes to action, it’s not worth keeping on your mind.

Task and remove, why? This is the step that breaks the camel’s back. An email either becomes a task, i.e. you add it to your to-do list and remove it from your inbox, or you hit the delete button.

Don’t be the guy that opens, re-opens, re-opens, re-opens, re-opens….. You can do better.

^ This happens all the time, BTW. If you’ve used Hubspot before, you’ll know that it’s not uncommon for people to reopen the same email 10+ times. Surely you’ve got better things to do, like watching Squid Games.

It’s that simple. If you want an in-depth explanation of how to play the inbox zero game. We’ve written one here with more words and pictures.

What’s Going On

Are you a yelper? Don’t be. This is how those ball-bags bully your favourite restaurants and cafes. #Hospitality

AllBirds removed the word ‘sustainable’ from all of their IPO materials. What a sham that would be. #Sustainability

If you want to get into the podcast game (as a guest) – First Round Capital goes impressively deep, here #Marketing

Mansa Musa – The Richest Person in history

What do you do when you have all the money in the world? You get famous, of course.

Thanks to Mansa Musa and my Dad, Timbuktu was the most recited city of my childhood. I still don’t know why but any question resembling ‘how long will it take to get there was always met with a rhetorical ‘how long till Timbuktu?

For 700 years, Timbuktu has been an oddly famous city. It receives relatively little media attention, hasn’t gone viral on Tiktok or featured in a Drake song. Yet, thanks to a religious pilgrimage circa 1300bc, it might forever be a place the world over knows of but little about.

Why? Mansa (King) Musa did something we part-time, and full-time wanna-be marketers can learn from. The most impactful and lasting marketing activities are not scalable.

You can run Facebook ads until Donald Trump becomes president again, but you’ll still be nothing more than a glitch in most people’s minds.

Mansa Musa, like every committed Muslim, carried out his duty of Haji with a twist. Rather than being a memorable moment for himself, he made the occasion unforgettable for everyone else.

He was accompanied by 60,000 people, from royal officials to soldiers and slaves. All draped in silk with gold embroidery. Mansa made his Haji a spectacle.

Gold flowed from his caravans as they waved their gold banners walking through the cities. Legend has It the gifts and donations received from his travelling circus were enough to feed people for ten years.

His entourage spent and donated so much gold that the market value in Cairo crashed by 20%. Causing $250 billion+ in economic loss (adjusted for inflation) and required a ten-year recovery.

Many ultra-wealthy people have been and gone, but none are more memorable or legend-able than Mansa Musa.

Macro unscalable – not cheap & repeatable, is how you become memorable and create a lasting legacy.

You can look to Conor Mcgregor, Logan Paul or Richard Branson for modern-day examples or read about the rest of Musa’s story here.

Who would have thought Tobacco companies kill their best customers?

The Eye Of The Storm

What do elite athletes, YouTubers and entrepreneurs all have in common?

The most important thing. Which means diddly-squat without context.

‘The most important thing’, a worthwhile read about common-folk investing written by the genius Howard Marks ironically shares that many things are the most important for making sound investment decisions.

But becoming the best in the world or achieving a goal, can almost always be boiled down to one thing.

Achievement draws on many variables but only one can be your most important. Without that one, as James Hetfield will tell you, nothing else matters.

Take a runner. They can buy all the gear, including too-short-lycra-shorts. Indulge in weekly massages and visualisations of breaking that winners ribbon. Still, without getting those miles on the clock, nothing else matters.

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice there’s only one number Elon truly cares about for SpaceX – ‘payload cost per kg’.

Mr Beast, the world’s most-watched YouTuber, only cares about ‘audience retention’ – the average percentage a video has been viewed.

For Bobsledders, it’s the maximum speed they can achieve on their push.

Hint, hint. If you’ve got a goal in mind, figure out what your most important number is and maximise, optimise, limit slash, do whatever you need to get that number right, and you’ll win.

Free tip, it’s, not the number of love hearts you received on Instagram today.

Have a question or want to chat about anything you’ve read this week, join our community slack channel. Got someone in mind who needs to know about the method, send them here. As always – Thanks for Look’n.