Taming your Email Inbox

A lot has been said and is being said on various blogs and on several GTD bulletin boards about email inboxes becoming repositories for hundreds of emails.  Unfortunately, this is not what the inbox is intended to be.  As they are sitting there, they become next actions that are not integrated into one’s system, FYI’s that are not filed for future reference, and items that have been delegated and have been left there as reminders of that designation.  Unfortunately, when they get mixed up like this, they become useless, as we now have to use our fallible memory to keep track of what’s what.  We forget which have been installed as next actions on our context lists, which have been acted on and are just lying there with no other actions required, which ones have been read, which ones have not, which ones have already been filed, and those that still need filing.

To keep this from happening, treat your email inbox just like your real inbox. 

Start at the top (although it doesn’t really matter if you start at the bottom) and read each item.  For each one, ask the three questions that David Allen says to ask of all items in our inboxes:

• What is it?
• Is it actionable?
• If, so, what’s the next action?

If the action will take less than two minutes, do it now.  If the action will take more than two minutes, create a next action (a to-do for those of you not doing GTD) and put it into one of your context lists (For those of you who don’t know what a context list is, see David’s book, Getting Things Done).  If you use a PDA, deviate from David’s process and add one more step.  Copy the text of the email and paste it into your action’s note section.  Now you can delete the email without feeling guilty as it is now in your system with the next action.  If you don’t use a PDA, if the email contains valuable support material, print it out and file it.  I use an action support file for temporary storage of support material.  This is in my desk drawer and is separate from my reference files, which are for long-term storage.  When I’m finished with the action (and the need for the support material), I file the material in my reference files.  If the email contains no support information, you can delete it.

Go through each email one at a time, repeating the process until the inbox is empty.  For those of us who average anywhere from 10 – 150 emails a day, this technique will work, although it will take from 5 minutes to an hour.  I usually schedule a separate block of time on my calendar during different parts of my day to process my email inbox.  That way the time is reserved.  I also have turned off all email alerts to keep me from running to the computer every time something comes in.

If you have more than 150 emails a day, you may have to invest in some software to help prioritize the email for more efficient handling.  You will still have to deal with each one personally. 

You can also train your assistant (if you have one) to screen your email inbox, just like your regular mail.  They can be authorized to respond with canned responses for some, see you for instructions on how to handle others (which they will do for you), and to forward the most important ones to you with the important parts highlighted.  My secretary also adds a summary and gives me a one sentence summary as to what my next action would be on the item, such as, “Submit a summary of this month’s sales figures, disaggregated by region, to the VP by Friday.”  I, then, integrate that into my system.

If you have an inbox that contains hundreds, if not thousands, of stored emails, you will have to schedule additional time to deal with the backlog.  When I faced this task I did the following:

• Sorted my email by date with the newest items at the top of my list. 
• I then created a storage folder and transferred everything over three weeks old into it.  That way I still had it if I needed it.  I didn’t do anything with those.  I let them stay there to die a natural death or, if one fought it’s way out, I could deal with it.  Everything that still remained there after two months was deleted.  I found I didn’t have to deal with about 95% of what I had put in there.
• I went back to my inbox and sorted it again, this time by sender and then by date.  I found that if I did that, the first couple of emails from a sender eliminated the need to read the older ones that dealt with the same subject by the same person. 

After cleaning out the backlog using regular processing steps, daily maintenance kept it clean.

Comments

[Scott]

Excellent tips. As an IT guy my email gets out of control fast. First thing I do is unsubscribe to things I don't find myself reading. Also, I do like you and sweep old email into a folder. I like to name that folder something like "nuke xx/xx/xx" where the xx's refer to some date a few months in the future. This way I can go in there an manage the email as I need it and then just plain delete it when that date rolls around.

[John Richardson]

Good morning Bert. Great post! I have found that using the GTD plugin for Outlook is very helpful. When I first implemented it I had to wade through over 1000 e-mails in my in-box. It took almost a day, but was a very worthwhile use of time.

I have found a useful implementation of the "hipster pda" (49folders.com). I make up 3x5 cards with the title "Next accomplishment" at the top. I go through my project list in Outlook and select projects that need to be "accomplished" today. I then list the next actions on the cards and I can carry them around with me during the day and check them off as they are done. It's simple and it works well. The next day I check off my GTD list in Outlook and create new cards. A paper hack to my electronic system.

John

[Kevin]

As much as I would like to try and sift through and categorize my email I have a solution using just outlook Flags to follow-up items of importance. I just update the time that I want it to remind me of the next action. Of course if the action takes 2 minutes due it! If I need to find something I use X1 to search my 4 gigs of email. It amazes me how I can do a quick search with X1 and find answers to people’s questions that I answered a year ago. I keep all of my email.

[John-Paul]

I use Outlook rules to keep my inbox empty and divide incoming e-mails into groups.

All incoming mail goes through a series of very simple rules. Is this a meeting response saying yes, is this an out of office message, is this a newsletter, is this one of a series of routine messages I get. These get moved into subfolders of a non-urgent folder. I never even bother to apply GTD review to these items.

A final rule moves everything not sorted into a different folder which is what I use as my default mailbox and this is what I use for my manual review.

It took a couple of months to identify all my routine messages, but rules doing the moving for me, means that I have to review only half as many items. The routine stuff probably fits into the GTD reference category, and I simply check it from time to time to make sure everything is as expected.

[Matthew Lock]

The Outclass plugin for Outlook combined with Popfile can be trained to automatically classify your messages into folders. It's a bayesian filter, but with multiple categories rather than just spam/inbox.

http://www.vargonsoft.com/Outclass/

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl