My Email Strategy
December 10th, 2009
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- I don’t go back to my inbox until the email has been archived or deleted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.
