by I’ve been busy lately, so I’ve been catching up on my RSS feeds in Google Reader on Saturday mornings while having coffee. This morning I read a post from 37signals that, among other things, mentioned keeping your email INBOX as empty as possible. I’ve seen lots of other people mention this and I can’t understand why this is such a big deal. I guess it’s a personal preference. A “less is more” stance to email management.
To me, “more is more” when it comes to my INBOX …
For me having several thousand emails in my INBOX has never been a big deal. Yes, filing email is useful and I do procmail mailing list traffic and such into their own folders (or tag as needed in GMail) to put stuff I know I shouldn’t be a high priority interrupt into a separate “queue”. But for everything else that makes it though a filter, I just leave it in my INBOX. If I need it later I hit search and *poof* there are the messages I need.
Searching my mail seems so much easier and painless the being fastidious about what goes where and maintaining a dedicated structure for content or remembering to tag every message with some descriptive text that I’ll forget about in a few weeks. If email is like a fire-hose, why bother dealing with the business end of it? Why not wait for everything to pool into a nice placid pond and then get some really nice sonar gear?
How do you deal with your email? Are you a filer or a searcher? A convert from one to the other?
ps… Once a year I will archive my inbox and start fresh, but mainly that’s for performance reasons more than anything else.. I generally get pissed off for the next 3 months about having to go search an extra folder when I need an old thread.
pps… striving to have a zero-length INBOX I think means that email becomes much much more of a high priority interrupt because then you not only feel the need to deal with the messages because they are waiting for you, but also to deal with the messages in order to keep your INBOX clean. I generally keep an eye on my INBOX whenever I have a spare cycle, and will read the things that I think need immediate attention. The other stuff stays “New” until I have a pocket of time to deal with it. The only magic rule is that at the end of the day anything marked as “New” needs to be dealt with in some way (read, respond, move, delete.. whatever) so that the next time/day I deal with email I know that the ‘New” stuff really is new. Things in my INBOX I tend to get annoyed with having to deal with a lot are fodder for a filter in order to re-queue/timeshift them.