Email Inbox to Empty

In my role, I get somewhere between 50 – 100 emails a day.  It’s tough to set enough time aside to go through them, let alone process the inbox to empty.  Most of the time, I’m happy just to scan through them to spot hot items that have to be dealt with.  One way to get my inbox empty is to process the actionable emails into my Palm’s @Categories.  Once the task is created and assigned a category, I then copy and paste the email body into the notes section of the task.  Then, I can delete the email without that guilty feeling that I’m throwing something away that I’ll need.  Check out other email inbox strategies over at 43 Folders.

Comments

[Jerry Roberts]

...Uh, okay, and what happens when you get behind on reviewing those notes? I have tried everything I can think of to deal with this issue, but the only thing that consistently works is consistently working at it.

1. Make sure that spam and content filters are updated once a week to reflect current activity. Stuff that's not critical to read, like some digests, are filed automatically and I can access them when I have made time for reading.

2. When I get in front of the computer for the first time in the morning I have maybe 50 messages waiting. I spend a few minutes filing and deleting, then another 10 minutes answering those that require it.

3. Every other time I sit down in front of the computer I peck away at whatever else has come in since the last time. This takes maybe two to five minutes, including firing off an answer or two.

4. I make another pass just before going to bed, maybe 10 more minutes max. Even on heavy correspondence days when more responses are needed, this is maybe 40-45 minutes.
Now I spend less time with e-mail and much more time with reading blogs -- and I'm a lot better off for it.

[Bert]

Yep, email can be a real pain. Your email load sounds like mine. As for how many times I go through my inbox to process, it's at least 3 - 5 times a day. This is simply a collection bucket that David talks about in GTD. It's up to me to empty it regularly. My original post addressed a behavior of mine: the reluctance to empty it because I'm afraid that after I delete the email, I'll lose any support value that the email holds. By transfering the body of the email to the notes section of a task, I save the support material AND I get to delete the email with no worries. The other question about how often I review the notes: I don't. The note of a task is simply support material. However, I review the task during my weekly review and in my review of my contextual tasks when I'm in that context, which could be several times a day. For example, if the task is an @computer task, I review that context list when I'm sitting at my computer. When I choose the task to work on, then I consult the attached note. If the email from which the task was generated contained a due date, I give the task a hard due date to reflect that. Otherwise, like David promotes, my tasks are undated.