Dealing with email everyday

Inspired by Cameron Molls “Embroided in email” article I thought I’d write about my system and how I’m dealing with emails everyday without loosing too much time with reading, sorting and archiving.

My rules are quite simple and there are only 3:

1) At the end of the day my inbox must be empty. Without exception. This leaves yourself with a feeling of “getting things done”.

2) I’ve given up on sorting and archiving. No topics-folders, groups-folders nor sender-folders. Everything that may be useful in the future just goes into my “archive folder”. In these days most email clients (Apple Mail or Thunderbird) have a decent search function. So it’s not worth the time to sort anything. Search is just fine and I never looked back to my complicated folder structures and sorting systems.

3) Things that can be done within 2 minutes are done immediately. Everything else stays in my inbox and is flagged or starred and processed later. I stopped replying to longer emails some time ago to get my things done. If something is really important people have to call me or stop by in person.

In the end this system helps me getting my things done and not getting stuck in replying to emails the whole time. Recently I even started thinking to cancel my mobile data push email plan and only check my emails once or twice a day.