I don’t recall exactly how it happened but some time in the early part of last week, my boss and I somehow ended up discussing email and keeping current with all of the email one receives. It is easy to get completely buried in email. I had one boss I had a couple of years ago explain the theory of email bankruptcy and how he tries to limit extreme to no more than once a year! He was my boss, I couldn’t tell him how awful I thought that idea was. He’s a sales manager. How bad does that look to clients? How many emails do you have sitting in your inbox right now? Me, I just checked, there are 10 in mine. Once I finish this post, I’ll empty it. Truth is it’s not that difficult to maintain your inbox, it’s just a matter of creating a plan to do so effectively. So, my current boss (with a couple thousand unread and a few thousand more unfiled) wanted me to show him how I keep mine under control. To be honest, once I started to think about it, I had no idea what I was doing. I just did it. I didn’t read some book written by someone far more intelligent than I—no one I know of wants to publish me, —and follow their plan. I just started keeping it under control. He still wanted me to teach him. He’s a very concrete guy and just wanted a plan. I didn’t have it. So, I gave it some thought for a couple of days and then—a couple hours before we were scheduled to meet—I figured out how to present it.

1. If you can handle the email quickly (read and file, quick response, needs to be forwarded and so on) just do it now and get it out of the way.
2. If it takes longer to respond or create the response, save it for “Quiet Time”. I made up that term on the fly, it works though. Schedule a time each day when no one will bug you and do all your responses.
3. If it is something which you get regularly and don’t need to read but may need to reference in the future, set up a filter so it’s not in the way.
4. If it’s junk and you don’t need it, delete it. It’s entirely too easy to somehow get signed up on one of the thousands of distribution lists which are out there. Get rid of them, 99.9% you never read. Most should have an unsubscribe button at the end, use that. If not, just create a filter to delete it on arrival.

To be honest, I went over this list several times before realizing, that’s it. You don’t need any more. All of your email (business or personal) should fall into one of those groups. That person you know who feels the need to forward any and every email about nothing vaguely important (jokes, latest urban legend which had been proved false on Snopes.com two years ago, or other chain emails with a ton of email address listed in each forward providing a great opportunity for spammers to cultivate lists) can be handled just like #4. Ask them to stop, if not, just create a filter to handle them. If there’s a remote possibility they may send you something important just give them their own folder and check it occasionally. Of course, this leads to the next topic. How many folders should you have? I don’t know. However, I’m leaning towards “the fewer, the better”. It wasn’t long ago that I would have folders for just about every possibility. My thinking was that it would make things easier if I stored any reference emails in a folder specifically marked for the type of information the emails contained or who they were from. However, this started to get confusing. I’d often spend too much time looking through several different folders to find what I needed. I’m now only dividing email into work, school, personal and other activities I’m involved with. I have all my various (nine at last count) email address’ going to one inbox. It saves quite a bit of time this way and it’s all in one place. It works for me and I have yet to run into the problem of someone asking about an email they sent and not seen it. Then again,

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