Email inbox strategy (for hoarders)
A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zaslow published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed two ways that people handle their email inboxes. There are the hoarders – those who keep every email that they’ve ever been sent – and the deleters, who religiously clean out their email inboxes and delete as many emails as they possibly can (then go back to the hoarders if they need to reference an email from the past).
Jeffrey’s original article hypothesized that your email inbox strategy reflects who you are and how you handle the rest of your life. He surmises that if you’re a hoarder, then probably you’re a hoarder and untidy in other parts of your life.
Personally, I’m an email hoarder. But it’s not because I’m not a neat or organized person. My (physical) desktop is clean and clear, and my important hard-copy documents are filed where I can find them. In my case, I’m extremely busy and receive an overwhelming number of emails. I do delete and act upon emails in my inbox in an expeditious manner. But I don’t spend time filing all of the emails in my inbox into specific folders. I’ll only file items that I really want to group together and that are obvious as to where they should go. However, for many of the emails in my inbox, I have no idea where I’d file them, and spending time finding a folder for each email is a waste of my time (in my opinion).
Besides, leaving emails in the inbox enables me to easily sort the list of emails by sender, subject or date so that I can easily follow conversations by person, topic or date. I can’t do that if all of my inbox emails are sorted out into a zillion different folders.
Without the right technology, however, this would be a failed approach. I often need to refer back to older emails, and I wouldn’t be able to find them without the right technology if they weren’t filed into folders. However, Google’s Desktop Search add-in – which I’ve previously reviewed – enables me to find anything I want (emails, Word docs, etc.) in a split second. It’s much faster than using the search utility in Outlook or Windows Explorer, and removes the need to file emails into folders in the first place.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to process your inbox. You still need to go through your inbox on a periodic basis and delete, respond to or act upon these emails.
Here are some thoughts regarding how the hoarders amongst our readership might handle their inboxes:
- Schedule send/receive operations to occur no more than every 15-30 minutes. Email is an off-line activity; if people need to reach you immediately (and need an immediate response, a big pet-peeve of mine!), then they should pick up the phone.
- Turn off email receipt notification. Check your email when it’s convenient for you, and don’t allow receipt notifications to interrupt your other work. Focus, focus, focus!
- Review and process all of your unread mail once every day or two with the goal of marking all messages as unread at the end of the review period. Emails should be deleted, responded to, filed (if you really want to do that) or acted upon by the end of the review exercise. If you’ve read the message and want to keep it, you can either file it in a folder or leave it (marked as read) in the inbox.
- Create tasks in your task management tool if an email cannot be acted upon following your inbox review exercise. Email applications are not (yet) good task managers. Instead of managing tasks in your email inbox, move the task to a good task manager that can allow you to properly organize and prioritize it. If the task must refer back to the email itself, you should move the email to an “Action Required” folder and have the task item (in your task management tool) reference the email in that folder.
- Set up filters and rules to auto-file items that you’ve in the past regularly received and moved into specific folders. This will save you time when you process your inbox since these emails will be filed without your intervention. You can access these rules in Outlook by clicking Tools, then Rules Wizard.
- Obtain a spam filtering application that gives you complete control over what is marked as spam. I use Trend Micro’s Anti-Spam for Microsoft Outlook. It’s free and it’s excellent. Do NOT rely on ISP-provided spam filters, as they often mark legitimate email as spam.
As a hoarder, you will also need to keep your email database at a reasonable size, especially if you work in a corporate environment where email storage space is limited. For Outlook users, you can do this by archiving emails from your active email database into the archive database (which, by the way, Google Desktop Search still indexes and searches). Within Outlook, you can set up auto-archiving by clicking Tools, Options then the “Other” tab. You can fine-tune the archive settings by folder by right-clicking on the folder and clicking the AutoArchive tab.
In a later article, I’ll provide some thoughts on techniques for the email deleters and “folder filers” amongst our readership.