I’ve found it, the holy grail every productivity pioneer - from
David Allen to the guys at Asian Efficiency - has been looking
for: the ultimate e-mail lifehack.  Many have pondered over the
fact that the ‘Inbox’ is broken, that there must be some other
way to do it. GTD-fetishists (under whom I count myself) have
adopted the 'Defer-Delegate-Delete-Respond-Do'-approach, made
famous by Merlin Mann’s ‘Inbox Zero’-talks.  This got me
thinking: why do I keep putting a self-induced system on top of
the infrastructure that is the e-mail inbox? Why not try and
rebuild that infrastructure to make processing my e-mails a
little easier?  And I’ve come up with something that appears to
be too simple for words, but that has profoundly changed my life
over the last couple of weeks:  The Smart Unread Inbox  I’ve
taken Apple’s option to create ‘custom inboxes’ based on rules
to create a virtual inbox which consists of items that comply to
these two rules:    • Are in the inbox   • Are unread  I’ve
hidden all other inboxes a