What I found out was largely as follows:

The hotel I was staying in advertised itself as having free wifi on the ground floor. It did, but the signal was no greater than 40%, and as I was on the 7th floor I had to come down to the bar to use it. This was fine, and I used this for my morning and evening email sessions.

There are lots of University buildings in London, some of whom subscribe to the JANET Roaming Service. As I’m a member of a participating University I can use their networks for free. This got me a connection on floor 7 of the hotel twice, and would have been an option in a couple of other places as well.

The rest of the time I generally used The Cloud, mostly in or around Pret A Manger stores. It’s possible to get free wifi in a fair few places (largely pubs and cafes), and my most productive session of the whole trip was the last hour outside Euston station where I got through all my home and work email with a near 100% signal.

So yes, I managed to stay up to date, and maintained Inbox Zero throughout the trip.

My current routine for dealing with email is quite simple:

• I only have two mail folders; Inbox and Dealt With.
• Everything comes into my inbox, and doesn’t leave my inbox until it has been dealt with.
• Dealing with a message could include reading it, replying to it, or using it as the basis for a calendar entry, a task, or a block of time put aside to work on a particular project. Once the item exists elsewhere, then the email itself is dealt with and so it can be moved.

I do this with all emails; at home and at work. Home emails are really straightforward, because most of them are from mailing lists or are for information only. I use Thunderbird at home, with Google Calendar to manage my schedule and tasks. At work I get a lot more mail, and it is a lot more important. I use Evolution for everything (or Outlook on Windows), and if a task is suitably complicated it gets converted into our call logging software and becomes a task/project with a target date and time put aside to work on.

As far as backups go, work email is backed up centrally. Home email is copied to the mail/file server in our study as soon as it is delivered, so that if I accidentally delete anything I have a second copy.

My other mail rule with email is that I have times in the day when I will always clear my inbox. In the morning before work I clear my home inbox. I then go to work, and clear my work inbox as my first job of the day. Then I clear it again before I leave. I then do home email again when I get in, and then again before I go to bed. I never leave work or leave home with messages that have not been dealt with.

And that’s how Inbox Zero works for me.