How to Keep Your Email Inbox Under Control

From Sil­i­con Val­ley Watcher

Many peo­ple have been ask­ing me how I keep my Gmail Inbox under con­trol. I get around 50 mails every day, but my inbox is always empty at the end of the day. I’ve talked about it many times but have not really gone into the details. Here are prin­ci­ples of inbox man­age­ment from David Silverman.

David Sil­ver­man

A reader recently asked me, “How do you deal with an incred­i­bly full inbox that makes you feel like a jerk?”

I’m happy the ques­tion asks, “how do you deal.” An inbox is as per­sonal a space as an under­wear drawer — we all have one and are all embar­rassed by both its orga­ni­za­tion and con­tents. Thus to tell some­one how to man­age their inbox could be per­ceived as an intru­sion into their undergarments.

And that would be inappropriate.

What is appro­pri­ate to share is my own prin­ci­ples of inbox management:

1. No scrolling. The inbox is my task list. I can fit about 20 emails in the mes­sage viewer in Apple Mail, which means 20 tasks. Any more than that and I feel like I’m los­ing con­trol. Noth­ing spurs me to action like the need to get rid of the scroll bars.

I per­son­ally use Gmail as my inbox and I use the same con­cept. When I have to use the scroll bar, that means there are just too many mails in the inbox left and it is time to purge.

2. Read, take action, and delete or save. Small task or big one, if it’s in the inbox, I do it. If not, it doesn’t exist (as my wife can tell you about any time we make vaca­tion plans).

I per­son­ally go through each and every email in my inbox, skim through the mail and decide: If it’s some­thing I do not need, I delete. If it’s some­thing I can reply to in less than a minute, I reply to it imme­di­ately. If it’s nei­ther, I file it as: 1 ACTION, 2 REPLY LATER, 3 FORWARD and/or 4 READ LATER. Among my READ LAT­ERs, I do a sec­ond fil­ing. I decide whether to file it as @POST for post­ing in this blog later.

3. If it’s a task for some­one else, file it. I find it hard enough to keep track of my own to-dos. Keep­ing tabs on other people’s through emails in my inbox would triple the num­ber of mes­sages and lead me down the road of micro­man­age­ment via the dreaded for­warded email that begins with, “Hey, have you had a chance to look at this yet?”

4. One email per topic. If there’s a chain of email on a topic, only the most recent gets to sit in my inbox. Every­thing else is filed.

5. Save every­thing that isn’t pure junk. Which email is impor­tant and which is not? It can be hard to tell. The email with a danc­ing banana? Prob­a­bly safe to toss. But will I need an email with the details of my cat’s last tooth clean­ing? Pos­si­bly. And with giga­bytes of stor­age on my hard drive, as easy to save as not.

6. Have very few file fold­ers. Almost every­thing saved goes into a folder called “saved.” With too many fold­ers, the time it takes me to sort and orga­nize emails is pro­hib­i­tive — and it often requires just as much time on the other end to locate the mes­sage I want. Instead, I rely on my email’s search fea­ture. (Just now, it was easy to uncover from my “sent mail” folder the infor­ma­tion that vet­eri­nary den­tal work costs a ter­ri­fy­ing $450 per feline.)

7. Daily scrub­bing. I brush my teeth twice a day. And every day, I run through every email in my inbox to see if I can get rid of it.

8. Noth­ing older than a month. I’ll let some­thing molder in the inbox for a up to a month if I’m not sure what to do with it — or if it’s some­thing I’d like to do but never seem to get to. But after a month, it’s clear I’ve got to do it or delete it.

Here are other arti­cles that might help you:

1. Quick Tips on Pro­cess­ing Your Email Inbox
2. Seven Ways to Orga­nize Your Email Inbox
3. The Inbox Zero Project