My email box on one account had accumulated 6000 emails. I save my emails incase a client ever needs to go back to old conversations. However, much of that 6000 is spam and stuff that should have gone away after the first read. Today I archived all my mail and am starting over with a new mail policy. Deal with it immediately! That means I read it and respond immediately then file it or throw it away. I can’t have stuff missed because I flag it for followup and never get back to it. I am going to work on the same concept in the physical world.
Email Overload!
2 thoughts on “Email Overload!”
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It’s called GTD, or Getting Things Done. A great book and philosophy. Process that inbox daily!
I started using Gmail for just this reason. An overloaded inbox causes me to just shut down and avoid it. Now every message gets tagged as soon as it comes in. This keeps the box “emtpy” Then I work down my tags so that I am dealing and looking at e-mails only for the task at hand.
Plus I added a box called unfiled, for things that do not necessarily have a “place” of their own. I prune this around the fist of every month and delete anything that over 30 days old. Because if I haven’t looked at it in 30 days, chances are, a. the information in it is too old to now be worth anything. or b. I haven’t looked at it since I got it, and chances are no matter how much longer I hold it, I will most likely never look at it anyway so out it goes.
You can of course do the same thing with Outlook using folders, (and actually I do that as well), I just like how fast the tagging system works in Gmail. (Plus you can now get Gmail for you own domain, so you don’t have to give up a personalized @domain.com for gmail.com.