Dealing with a slow-to-empty Inbox

[Bastien_Siebman]

A clean Inbox is the cornerstone of productivity, whether it is your email inbox or your Asana Inbox.

Emptying our Inbox is a recurrent and heated topic at our company, because we actually have different ways of using Asana. For example, I would often create a task to do something that was asked of me in a comment. My co-founder would keep the notification around until he did what was expected. And he would be drowning quickly. So we had to talk it out to make sure everyone feels confortable!

Here’s a list of strategies we came up with to empty an Asana Inbox. Each action is followed with archiving the said notification. As you’ll experience, a notification might come as a result of you being a collaborator on a topic you shouldn’t have been a collaborator on. So for every bothering notification, ask yourself “should I receive this?” and if not, find out why and how to fix this situation.

Our strategies:

1. Refuse the work through a comment and communicate about your own priorities: “I won’t have time sorry, is next week ok?”,“I have other priorities, X and Y”
2. Create a follow-up task assigned to yourself
3. Create a subtask assigned to yourself
4. Assign the task to yourself
5. Read the update and then leave the task (remove yourself from the collaborators)
6. Bookmark the notification so it goes in the “Bookmarks” tab

General rule of thumb: decide as a team when to involve whom, stop involving the whole team on every little topic.

Any strategies we missed?

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Bastien, Asana Expert
iDO (Asana Partner: Services & Licenses)

[Arthur_BEGOU]

Great tips.

Somme additions:

If you are overwhelmed with inbox, there are some filters that could play a role to help you focus on the most important notifications first.
Examples:

And in some cases, for example if you come back from time off, and the inbox is cluttered, I personally think it’s fine to just scan everything, extract only the important stuff (eg. creating follow-up tasks), and empty it all (button “Archive all”), to start fresh.

[Fabian_Hachur]

please explain your opinion on the reason why an empty inbox is the cornerstone of productivity. in my experience, nothing hinders a productive person from having a cluttered inbox. regards,

[Arthur_BEGOU]

@Fabian_Hachur
" in my experience, nothing hinders a productive person from having a cluttered inbox"
=> What about you explain your diverging opinion first, please

[Jacky5]

1. Work through comments → ask them to assign a Task to you. This way, your teammate has to assume responsibility of briefing work / tasks correctly and not chatting it quickly over and you are responsible for keeping track of his request.

3. Help others brief you tasks better with task templates or forms to gather all information you need.
4. Specify in the task description if it’s a hard deadline + its priority, or if it can be moved. Best is to assign a 1 week start / end date which allows the responsible person to plan their work more flexible.
5. If you have set processes and phases, make use of automated workflow.
   A) Define which person will be assigned / or removed when a task is in a specific list, or has a specific label etc. B) Add / remove involved person in the tasks so they get / stop being notified. C) Add Subtasks with an assigned person and due date.

[Arthur_BEGOU]

Some great ideas thanks @Jacky5

[Daniel46]

Thank you for those tips. Here’s one more:

Facing a full inbox I do this:

• Scroll through all messages and bookmark every message that needs my attention or response
• Press archive all at the bottom
• Go to bookmark messages and unbookmark them

This leaves me with an inbox full of relevant messages. And I have kept track of all messages all the way down to the bottom of the inbox