> Seriously, I'm not trolling - why would you want to snooze an email (hide it from inbox and have it come back later - I had to go look it up)?
Example that happened to me yesterday: a colleague asks me for a piece of information that I know I can find in a book at home, but I'm at work. I snooze the email so that it doesn't fall at the bottom of my inbox, and so that it gets redelivered when I'm home and can access the book.
Hypothetically, wouldn't really aggressive archiving accomplish the same task?
Have a 0-email inbox, and if you get something that you can't address immediately (but you can take care of later in the day), then you leave it in the inbox. In the meantime, anything you can act on in some way gets acted upon and then archived. By the end of the day you would ideally have just that email in your inbox (and even in a realistic world you might have a few tasks lingering in your inbox, but few enough that you can glance and see that "task" still there). Check your email at the end of the day and act on the things you needed to postpone for whatever reason (as well as pruning emails loitering in the inbox).
This requires, as previously said, really aggressive archiving, but since there's no difference between inbox and all-mail as far as I know (unless you use it as a search operator e.g. "from:[email protected] label:inbox"), it wouldn't be that big a cost (except that you would have to remember to archive or go through later and archive stuff).
I had been doing this somewhat organically for a while - tagging emails that didn't get filtered automatically and archiving them when there was nothing more for me to do with them - but when I disabled all of my filters (a misguided experiment I don't recommend anyone attempt) I stopped.
I'm awful at remembering to do anything. When doing inbox zero, I find it really useful to be able to postpone emails so I get a push notification on my phone when they come back into my inbox. That way I know if there is anything in my inbox, I should look at it pretty soon to decide how to process it (deal with it or postpone it)
Agressive archiving and postponing emails aren't mutually exclusive. They complement each other really well.
[edit] It also reduces stress. Some things can be dealt with until the evening, or tomorrow, or the weekend. It's really nice not having to pick though a middle of things that need to be done later and now and be constantly reminded that there's all these things to do. Of course, you can tag them or put them in folders, but it's nice when those tags/folders then let you know they're due.
Yeah, I do hardcore archiving and practice inbox 0 as much as possible, and it does alleviate that need. But it's still nice to have the email be at the top just when I get home.
Example that happened to me yesterday: a colleague asks me for a piece of information that I know I can find in a book at home, but I'm at work. I snooze the email so that it doesn't fall at the bottom of my inbox, and so that it gets redelivered when I'm home and can access the book.