Handling email when you it arrives in your inbox is a big challenge – you need to overcome the momentum of your existing habits.
For this to stick, you need to be convinced that- the system you’re leaving behind is going to break at some point- your new approach will work
Let’s say you’ve already handled your existing email and your inbox is clear. You hit send/receive, and your new messages arrive. What do you do next?
- go through the messages, one at a time.
- decide what you’re going to do with the message
- delete it, file it for later reference, reply immediately, or transfer it into your to-do list system- move onto the next message
When you’ve finished this process for each message, you can get back to your normal work again.
One case that hasn’t been mentioned yet: what if you’ve replied to a message, but you can’t be sure that the person will respond to your question or request. Instead of moving that message to your “done” list, you can move it to a “follow up” list, or into your to-do system, to return to it later.
So this leaves you with this kind of folder structure:
- inbox (always empty, or containing only new messages that you have yet to look at)
- Drafts (messages that are in progress, awaiting the completion of a reply)
- done (all unread messages, kept to a sensible folder size, ready for searching)
- mailing_list (bulk email that you’d like to read or reference one day – you can eliminate this folder altogether and just use “done”, but it’s a good workaround if your “done” folder is filling up too quickly)
- follow_up (email where you need to follow up a reply)
- Sent (the record of all messages you’ve sent – you may need to archive these as the folder size grows)
Much simpler to find messages than with a structure of hundreds of folders, and easier to file messages too. Try this approach for a week, and you’ll see where the gaps are (where you need to fine-tune), and how it can fit into the way that you work.