Email: Filer or Piler?

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We were having a couple of after-work drinks today, and for a short time the topic of organisation, in particular email filing, came up. On one side, we had a guy that didn’t really do any filing – everything was in his ‘inbox’. Even more extreme was another person who didn’t even delete meaningless emails – again, everything in the ‘inbox’.

A colleague and I were on the other side, organisation is key. My particular aim is to reach ‘inbox zero’ every day. I hate seeing a list of items sitting there, applying their silent pressure to my brain. I think that you should act on an email as soon as you get it. Sure, that decision might be as simple as tagging it for action at a later date, but at least the decision is made, the email is tagged and can be filed away. Of course, the best key to use when making filing decisions is the delete key, and I recommend that you don’t hold back in its use.

So what system do you use? Do you have a system? Is it a byzantine collosus of nested folders, or do you throw everything in a single archive? Or are you one of those scary people who just lives in the inbox?

  • http://www.rodneyolsen.net Rodney Olsen

    Lots of folders and sub-folders.

    I’m amazed at the amount of people who only have an inbox. That would drive me crazy. How can they ever find the email they need?

  • http://rosemary.id.au rosemary

    Since using Gmail I only have two places for email. The inbox and archive. Email is easy to find because of the powerful search features. You can type in anything you recall about an email to get it back – name of contact, keywords, address, date range. When I first used it a few years ago I gave each message a label – much like the folder systems I was familiar with… but after a while I realised it was unnecessary. Tags would be a nice addition.

    I have recently switched to a Mac and tried using Apple Mail for a month with the Mailtags application – nice scheduling with iCal, but after 1 month I have reverted again to Gmail because I love its simplicity.

  • http://irisflavia.blogspot.com/ Iris

    I use sub-folders, too. But I got very careful in deleting mails – too often people asked me about some mail I thought was done…

  • http://www.mailinglists.com.au/ Buy Mailing Lists

    Me, I keep my emails on my inbox for future reference well all I delete is spam messages