I watched the Google Tech Talk given by Merlin Mann of 43 folders on "Inbox Zero". Inspired by the talk, I finally cleaned out my inbox. Actually, it was a bit easier because I've tried a couple of times this month to clear out everything that came in July, so there were only 30 or so messages to deal with, but this time I officially created a DMZ tag and moved everything prior to July there (1165 messages, including 162 unread — thank god for gmail's new "select all" feature). I almost didn't make it because I fell down the trap of starting to do something an email message reminded me off, but caught myself in the middle when I realized it was going to take at least half an hour and made myself a note to finish it later instead.

It's really weird to see Google tell me "No new mail!", since I don't remember seeing that message in a long time. But it makes it a lot easier to remind myself to actually deal with email rather than leaving it in my mailbox, since it's much more manageable to deal with 1-5 messages than to look at a huge big inbox. It also makes email checking a less rewarding distraction, since when I get no new mail (it happens sometimes!), I see an empty inbox, rather than 1100 messages that I could be doing something about. I've done this once before, though, and it devolved back to a full inbox, so I'll report back in a couple of weeks how it's going this time.