Managing Email

Many people have trouble managing their email messages. It's common for them to get numerous messages in their inbox to the point that it's easy to miss messages that really should be dealt with in a timely manner. This page is intended to collect ideas for better management of email.

• When you have many messages in your inbox, it can be overwhelming to clean it up. One technique I've found useful is to move all the messages from the Inbox to a new folder called something like "Old Inbox." This makes it less overwhelming to deal with any new messages that show up in your normal Inbox while you methodically deal with old ones.
• Another approach I've found useful is to create a system of folders for organizing messages. Here are the folder names along with a description. The specific names have the great characteristic of grouping and sorting the folder names in an intelligent manner.
  • Priority A Urgent - important and time sensitive
  • Priority B Important - important, but nobody will care if I don't deal with it in a timely manner
  • Priority C Useful - useful email, but it's acceptable to never deal with it
  • Retain 1 Month - messages that may be deleted after a month
  • Retain 1 Year - messages that may be deleted after a year
  • Retain Forever - messages that should be kept around unless specifically deleted
• The following additional techniques I've found useful for helping someone else manage their email
  • Have a clear policy of never deleting anything. If you believe it should be deleted, move it to a folder with an appropriate name. This helps overcome the fear from the person you're helping or from yourself that you'll delete something important. I've set up 2 folders along these lines.
    • "Useless as per Bryan" - stuff from either inbox or "Old Inbox" that I believe should be deleted
    • "Useless Junk as per Bryan" - stuff from junk folder I believe should be deleted