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If you’ve worked with me, you know we follow the same process in every room that we organize together: declutter, categorize, & store. The process is the same for managing email.
Declutter: Start with the most recent 50 emails in your inbox. Feel free to ignore the rest. (More on the power of archiving later.)
First, delete anything extraneous, unsubscribing as you go. Turn off all notifications. This way, you can visit sites at your convenience rather than being bombarded by their updates.
If you want to remember a website or article or product, bookmark the link instead of keeping the email as your reminder. (You can see that I store bookmarks by category for easy reference: banks, finances, media, etc.)
Categorize: Still addressing only your most recent 50 emails, categorize what remains after you declutter. I recommend categorizing incoming emails not by their subject but by their urgency.
You can see that I categorize by using one of three task-oriented labels: ‘do soon,’ ‘do later,’ and ‘waiting for.’ When I receive an email that’s related to a task, I either handle it right away or drag it into one of the three labeled folders. In this way, I keep my inbox empty and my incoming emails triaged.
Then, when I have time, I work my way through my ‘do soon’ folder. Once I’ve completed a 'do soon' task, I then archive or delete the corresponding email.
Periodically I’ll check my ‘do later’ folder to see if I need to move any of those tasks to the ‘do soon’ folder. My ‘do later’ tasks are not urgent. I may not ever get to all of them because I have more meaningful things to do with my life.
I use the ‘waiting for’ folder to store emails that are not related to a task, but instead to something I’m waiting for: a date to be confirmed, an invoice to be paid, a package to be delivered, a return to be credited, an event to attend. Once the 'waiting for' item is complete, I then archive or delete that email.
(Not only do I label incoming emails 'waiting for,' but also outgoing emails that require a response. After sending an email that requires a response, I go into the ‘sent’ file and label that email ‘waiting for.’ In this way, I don’t have to remember if or when I sent something; my system remembers it for me.)
Store: Archiving emails is like putting items in a cupboard and shutting the door. You can’t see them, but they are still there. I archive any emails that I want to reference again and/or that are completed tasks.
Then, when I want to find an email in the archives, I type keywords into the 'search mail' bar. (For example, ‘Jane Doe’ will bring up all correspondence with Jane Doe. ‘Bike rack’ will bring up all references to bike racks.)
If you have lots (!) of emails in your inbox, try working through the most recent 50 as described above, then archiving the rest. If it makes you nervous not to see all your emails, practice archiving from the most recent 50 and then retrieving them again using keywords. Then consider taking the archive leap.
Alternately, consider a fresh start. Sign up for a free Gmail account, give your new email address only to people and businesses you choose, and then follow the declutter, categorize, & store steps above to maintain a zero inbox.
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