One of the weirdest compliments I’ve ever had was when one of my bosses in my previous job¹ told me I had a “tidy inbox.” The person who mentioned it to me then forwarded me a few articles on the topic which, in retrospect, I wish I had kept, because it helped me to evolve my own style toward email management. Between being a freelancer, managing freelancers and working increasingly remotely with my home office, I’ve realized that a lot of people don’t have very good email management skills, which is a shame as email is probably the bedrock of Internet communication. I’m not thinking so much about email etiquette (which is a totally different and pretty complex topic in its own right), but rather just the act of managing and maintaining email that some people aren’t great at.

Having talked to some other people who are good at managing email, I think everyone ultimately ends up evolving their own method, but over the years I’ve developed my own style called “email triage.” I think I picked up the core of it from the Getting Things Done method, but whenever I open an email in my inbox, I force myself to do something with it: delete it, file it, respond to it, or triage it.

Delete It

What emails I delete is something I’ve actually been changing in recent weeks. For a long time I was an obsessive hoarder of email, and Gmail certainly didn’t help my tendencies when they kept increasing their storage size. However, I’ve bumped into my Exchange mail limit a few times since I’ve started at White Wolf, and one day I realized that I kept a lot of crap emails that I just didn’t need anymore, so I’ve become more aggressive with deleting them. I don’t have a firm metric on what I keep and what I delete, but generally if I think I’ll need to reference it at least once in the future, I save it. If I’m not sure, previously I would save it, but now I’m deleting it. I haven’t yet regretted this, but we’ll see how it works.

File It

Filing emails is another part of the method that I’ve evolved recently. In Gmail, it’s easy to add new labels, but over time that gets unwieldy, and I’ve tried to delete labels that I haven’t used or referenced in a couple years. In Exchange I had a pretty detailed folder structure, but as search has improved in both Outlook and my various phones, I’ve recently simplified them to a “two deep” structure – each folder can only have one layer of subfolders. The less folders I have, the easier it is for me to refine my search at the start.²

Respond to It

Another tip I think I got from GTD was that if I can answer an email in two minutes or less, I respond right after I open it. From there, I either delete it or file it, but it doesn’t often stay in my inbox once I’ve responded to it. This is often why people who email me (or comment on this blog, or post to Twitter) will get responses from me pretty quickly – because it’s easier for me to just respond and clear it off my desk rather than try to prioritize such a simple task.

The problem I’ve noticed with this over the years is that if I can’t respond quickly, I sometimes forget to respond at all. For a long time I had a bad habit of not letting freelancers know that I had received their drafts or contracts, and when they followed up with me I felt like crap for not getting back to them. For a while I used the “responded to” icons in Outlook to manage this for me, but as I used my iPhone and Evo more to answer emails, I couldn’t rely on that as much. I’ve decided to accept responding more than once accidentally instead of not responding at all, and seeing how that works.

Triage It

Generally, this is the “I can’t deal with this now” option. Since all email that isn’t triaged is out of my inbox one way or the other, my inbox becomes my “things that need your attention” list. Each day, I open each email in my inbox and go through the same process again – delete, file, respond, or back into triage. During the day, I’ll often glance at it and see if anything’s changed during the day, but if I miss something, I know I’ll pick it up during tomorrow’s triage. Sometimes, I forget if the action I needed to take was a response or something else (which is why I used to sometimes forget to respond to things). Now, instead of assuming I responded, I assume I didn’t respond and risk emailing people twice on the same topic.

Of course, the key to this is to keep the inbox relatively small – if there are a huge list of emails sitting in my inbox, it’s harder to triage. One thing I’ve started doing in the past couple of years is add a fifth step, which is “put it on my to do list.” Essentially, this is just a different triage, but if I know that, for example, I can’t respond to a particular email for several weeks, I’ll put it on my to do list (kept in a separate location), and then delete or file it. That way, I’m not looking at it every day and thinking I need to do something with it, but it’s also not completely off my radar.

Making Obsession Work For You

The reason why a lot of this works is that I’m weirdly obsessed with the idea of a clean inbox – I get satisfaction at seeing it be completely empty. This system means that, odds are, I’ll pretty much always have a few emails in my inbox, but since I like to not have things in my inbox, I’m always looking at them and going “can I get you out of my inbox yet?” Other people seem to actually like having everything in one place – they would rather have an inbox with thousands of emails because they’re more comfortable thinking they can find anything quickly.³ I don’t know how you would triage under that system, because even the idea of having more than a few dozen emails in my inbox at once is baffling to me. But it’s all about finding out how you relate to your email habits, and finding that delicate balance between it being satisfying and irritating.

What methods do you use to keep your email under control?