GTD & Zero Inbox

A couple weeks ago I fell down the Lifehacker rabbit hole looking for journaling and productivity things (two subjects that don't really go together, to be realistic about it).
It was a good time, though, and I found a bunch of things of interest.

One of which is something I had found before - GTD, or Getting Things Done. 
Which is funny - the internet is a giant rabbit hole for the subject of GTD, when the whole point of it is to be, well, getting things done, which you cannot do when you are looking all of this stuff up!

Either way, one of the "tenants" is something called Zero Inbox.
And while "inbox", as of late, as come to mean e-mails, it also means any incoming papers.
I do not have many incoming papers (and what I do have is taken care of quickly) - what I do have is e-mail.

Tons and tons of e-mails.
My personal e-mail account is one that I have had since I was, oh, 16 (and I'm almost 24 at this point), so that's a lot of messages. And, it's a Google account, so it has chat logs as well (from GTalk, which is now Hangouts). Tons and tons.
And while the account tied to this stuff here (ie this blog and such) doesn't have nearly as much in it, that inbox wasn't at 0 at all either.

The beauty of GMail is the archive feature. You can still keep e-mails, but get them out of your actual inbox, as well as give them labels. So I could, theoretically, archive everything in the inbox and say that I'm at 0.
Which would be true.

And for this account, that's kind of what I did. I deleted all the fluff (password reminders, newsletter type things, etc) and archived the rest (blog comments and such).
And that was super simple. Done and done.

That left my personal account. The wormhole, so to speak.
My archive had about 4500 e-mails. And that's including a clear out that I apparently did in 2013 or so, because all I have is tax return documents and such, going back to about 2010 - no idea when that happened, though I'm sure it involved a lot of hours somewhere deleting things.

I can safely say "a lot of hours" because I have spent some time in the past week going through my archives - starting at the beginning, going through e-mails or chat logs, looking for anything important (which I haven't found much of yet) and deleting what isn't important any more. And let me tell you, the chat logs of 16 year old me weren't really all that important...a lot of ("so anyways!").

But at the same time, it's kind of fun. 
Considering I don't have any of the journals from that time period (explained here), this is sort of the next best thing. It's rather amusing looking through all of it. And it has found me some crazy things that I had forgotten about.

And while I would never suggest wasting your time looking through old e-mails (because it really is a time sink...let's not discuss how many hours I've spent on it, to only get my archive count down to 3400), Zero Inbox is a fantastic place to be.

Plus, on the GMail app, it looks like this:

Which is just special in itself.

While I don't entirely understand the reasoning behind having nothing in your inbox (as I have always kept things that may be useful later in the inbox and never had any issues), it is much less to look at. And that's probably the point.

~Havok

P.S. If you have an older GMail account, do you remember at the bottom of the inbox, it would say x% used of y% and counting? My personal account claims that I have 65 GBs of space, while the account tied to this nonsense claims to only have 17 GBs available to it. So, Google, thank you for counting for all those years that you did.