Of Inboxes and Men, Part 2
I wasn’t planning on a writing a sequel to my recent post, Of Inboxes and Men, discussing how people manage their inbox. But plans change. I recently read an older blog post from Michael Hyatt on the subject of email inboxes, and it’s got me rethinking my own email strategy.
A little background first… Michael Hyatt is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. I follow him on Twitter, and when he recently tweeted a link to a blog post on email inboxes, it caught my attention. As a CEO, I imagine that he gets a lot of email. I also know from his tweets, that he cleans out his inbox every night. So I figured he would probably have something meaningful to offer on the subject of email inboxes.
I wasn’t wrong. You can find Michael’s original post here.
In his post, he talks about how to clean out your inbox everyday and several strategies for making it easy. But what really caught my attention was how he files old emails.
Simply put, he doesn’t.
He has one folder titled “Processed Mail”, and moves anything he might want later into that folder. Then later, he uses the search features of the email program to find what he’s looking for. Michael believes it’s more efficient and takes less time than using a lot of subfolders.
I use approximately 150 subfolders to file away old emails at work. My system isn’t working. I work a lot of different projects with a lot of different suppliers. I never know whether to file old emails under the supplier’s name or under the project. I end up doing a mix of both. Sometimes it takes quite a while to find the right folder.
So I’m thinking about trying Michael’s advice. It’s a big change and I’ve been thinking about this for several days now, trying to decide if it will work.
I think my plan of attack will be to try it for a month, or so, without doing away with the older emails already in the subfolders. I can always go back and refile the ”processed mail” folder later if I bail on the whole thing.
Thoughts? Is anyone else doing this?
i’ve been moving toward that, but haven’t been able to give up the safety net of 473 folders.
I do know from what a few friends have said that it’s helpful if you have a way to tag emails so you can search by keyword. I know there’s an add-on available that does this for Mac’s email client, but I don’t know much more than that. Would love to hear how this works out for you!
I do something similar, but segregate it by year and then 4 subfolders, one for each quarter of the year. I am pretty good about remembering what year something happened, or at least I used to be, but advanced find usually turns up things if I can’t remember the year and or quarter. It also simplifies things when document retention time rolls around. I am kind of like you that I work a lot of various projects and the thought of making new folders every time I took on something else is too overwhelming. I will admit that I don’t clean out my inbox every night, or even every week, it usually turns into a massive drag and drop into the correct quarterly folder once I weed out all the junk emails that I don’t need to keep.
Shannon - I like that idea of segregating it by year or quarter.