As a child, I was obsessed with everything in my room being perpendicular or parallel to everything else. I was a weird kid — very organized, but weird. My love for organization is the major reason why I was able to be a triple major in college, a product manager at Google, a successful entrepreneur and now CTO of Doctor.com. 

At the workplace, organization equals integrity. When you are organized, you keep your word. It’s not just a soft skill — it’s a critical asset that’s required to get the job done consistently. When the people around you know they can rely on you, you’ll advance further, faster. If you invest time and energy to develop these skills, you’ll notice immediate benefits, including lowered stress, increased productivity and greater workplace satisfaction.

To start with the basics, I encourage you to read (or listen to) Getting Things Done by David Allen. I read this book back in 2006 while I was a PM at Google, and it was invaluable. Over the years, I used these fundamentals plus mastery of some new technologies to create specific, repeatable tactics that have taken my organizational skills to the next level. Here are the steps to recreate what I do — feel free to take what you like from this case study and ditch the rest. 

Step 1: Minimize Your Inboxes

By inbox, I mean a place where things go that you need to do, e.g., email, tasks or other things that require your attention. Have as few of these as possible, because you’ll want to revisit each of them multiple times each day. For most people, that means email, calendar, notes, chat and maybe a group task-tracking app like Jira or Salesforce. If you have more than that, see if you can combine by forwarding one system to another. Note that physical reminders like post-its are okay, but don’t go overboard!

Step 2: Prepare Your Email For Inbox Zero

Productivity expert Merlin Mann coined “Inbox Zero” as an approach to your email with the goal of minimizing how much of your brain is in your inbox. For each message, you either archive, delegate, respond, defer or do. Here are personal shortcuts that I use in Gmail to achieve this effortlessly:

• Sort messages by thread. Even if you don’t use Gmail’s auto-threading, Outlook can do this. If you sort by threads, you’ll be able to go through conversations much, much faster, especially long ones. Side-benefit: You won’t reply to the middle of a conversation only to discover later that the conversation continued in a way that made your reply look silly.