In the past, I’ve made numerous attempts to pull in the reigns on my email “situation”, but nothing worked. Three months ago, I had literally thousands of emails in my inbox – today I have zero. I haven’t been getting less email, in fact I’ve probably been getting more, but I’ve been handling it differently.
I’m no expert, but I’ve had a few people ask me how I’ve been keeping my inbox empty, so here’s the strategy that has worked for me:
- I check email every 20-30 minutes, and I process it immediately
- processing means reading, determining if an action is necessary, then deleting or archiving
- sorting email sucks, so I use one archive folder and search
- if a follow-up action is required, I a) do it right away if I can do it in less than 5 minutes, or b) star the email for a reply, or move the task to a to-do list (I use Things)
- I don’t go back to my inbox until the email has been archived or deleted
- I set aside time before lunch and at the end of the day to write longer replies
- I write filters/rules for assigning labels to newsletters, digests, cron reports, etc. so they can be mass selected deleted
That’s it in a nutshell. It’s nothing revolutionary, it just takes some discipline, but I promise it gets easy, and makes staying organized much easier.
For the canonical source on email productivity, check out this guy.
5 Comments to “My Email Strategy”
Nice post Adam,
Funny you should post this – somewhat unrelated – I started using a gmail archive folder linked to all the computers I use as an archive folder so that my archives are always available to me. It even stores attachments.
I LOVE the Gmail archive. There’s no thinking, just click the archive button and it’s filed. I also find that I rarely look back beyond the first page of my archive, which is probably a sign that I can be deleting more.
This is almost EXACTLY how I deal with email with two exceptions.
1. I check email much more often than you do. Probably every 5 minutes at the longest.
2. I auto-file daily or weekly reports I get from scripts, people, etc. This makes it a lot easier to go back through history for specific things I want to look for because I have a good mind map for what’s in there and what I need, which I don’t always have with my general email.
I delete very little. Just spam mostly. Everything else goes into my gigantic Archive folder. I’m on the 2nd one since the first one just got too big and slow. I’m about due for #3 since my #2 Archive is approaching 25,000 emails.
Our fundamental systems and email philosophies are identical though, and it was liberating to get to that point. I miss almost nothing now.
Awesome. My claim that I check 2-3 times per hour isn’t 100% true. I check 2-3 times per hour when I’m heads down on a task. If it’s one of those days where I’m back and forth between tasks all the time, then I check much more frequently. The point being that I want email to work for me, and not the other way around. If it detracts from my focus, I check less, but if it’s not a hindrance I’ll check more frequently.
I still have a lot of old folders from previous attempts to file manually. I’m going to test my system and dump these all into my archive today.