How I keep my Email Under Control

I have ended each day for the last 4 years with the coveted "In-Box Zero". A friend and I were talking earlier today about how he can be better organized with his email and I thought he might not be the only one. Here is how I approach email and achieve in-box zero every night.

This approach might not work for everyone, and that's okay, it took me trying several different ideas before I formed the one that worked for me. Feel free to take parts of this and parts from another system to form your own strategy for dealing with email.

And before you start throwing Monkey Shit...I know that this won't work for everyone.

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Filing System

I used to have tons of folders to store my email and I would painstakingly make sure that I filed every email to the right folder. That was a complete waste of time. I recommend ONE folder for saved email called “Archive”. I put ALL of my email in that folder when I save it. The search function in every email system is good enough to find what you need quickly. I have never in the 4 years I have been working with this system lost an email. EVER. It saves me tons of time worrying about where I should file an email.

Get rid of your hundreds of folders. Archive everything and search for it later.

NOTE: You will need other email folders…that comes later.

Email Bankruptcy

I borrowed this term from Michael Hyatt and put my own twist on it. If you have more than 300 emails in your inbox you will want to declare bankruptcy on your inbox. Just archive ALL of these emails. It is that simple. If that scares you then the alternative is to archive everything older than 2 weeks. The truth is if you haven’t responded in 2 weeks it probably wasn’t that important anyway. This will help you get your inbox to Zero INSTANTLY so you can implement the ongoing management system

Ongoing Maintenance

First, you have to decide that you will keep your inbox decluttered. It is a way of life not something you can just “do” every once in a while. Here are the rules:

  1. I don’t care how often you look at your email, but you must deal with every item in your inbox by the end of the day. This is non-negotiable.
  2. There are 4 options with every email: Respond, Archive, Delegate, or Marinate. That is it. ALL EMAIL FITS IN ONE OF THOSE BUCKETS.
  3. 99% of emails that require a response take less than 2 minutes to process. If you need to respond…do it IMMEDIATELY and then archive the original email.
  4. If you don’t need to respond then decide if you need to Delegate or Marinate. If neither, then immediately archive the email.
  5. If you need to delegate you will want to create a “tickler” to remind you. Create Folders for the days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
  6. Place your delegated email into these folders on the day you want to be reminded to follow-up. After you deal with your inbox in the morning, the very next thing you do is open the tickler folder to see what needs to be dealt with today.
  7. I do not recommend placing a delegated email into a folder more than 7 days in the future. Things change or you might have a text, in person meeting, or phone call that clears up that email prior to the day it is in your folder. Keeping those delegated tasks top of mind at least weekly will force you to deal with them. You can simply re-delegate if it needs more time. The trick to this is that you end up getting pissed that it hasn’t been dealt with so you naturally start pushing it forward.
  8. Sometimes you have an email that you need to marinate on for a while. Marinate means you are the only one that can deal with this email, but you can’t do it right away or you need to think on it. The same rules apply to marinated email.
  9. It is rare to have any email at all that you don’t need to do anything with for several weeks. If that is the case then you should put that on your calendar and archive the email.

That’s it. This is the system I use to keep my inbox at ZERO every day.

Here are some examples:

Respond:

I receive an email from a subordinate asking me if I can help him with some technical accounting issues on Thursday at 11:15. I immediately check my calendar, note that I am free and send him an email confirming I can help then. I archive the email and place the appointment on my calendar.

Archive:

I receive an email from my chiropractor that confirms my appointment at 2:30pm on Friday. I place the appointment on my calendar and immediately archive the email.

Delegate:

I receive an email on Tuesday from a friend that runs a charity seeking a donation for their silent auction. I forward the email to the marketing department to see if this is an interest area for us. I give them 2 days to read and think about the donation so I file the email in my Thursday folder.

Marinate:

I receive an invite on Friday to attend a conference with a business target in June. The conference isn't something I very interested in topically, but spending the week with this particular target could be helpful for relationship building. I am going to be out of town all weekend and I don't really have time to think through this before I leave. I place it in my Monday folder so I can marinate on it over the weekend.

It takes a couple of days to get used to doing it this way…but you will no longer have to worry that you are missing something, forgetting something, or feel overwhelmed when you open your inbox.

 

The point of all of this is to make sure you are dealing with email at the appropriate time and keeping your inbox clear so that it isn't overwhelming.

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." - Mickey Bergman - Heist (2001)
 

I was having an issue where I was dealing with one person on multiple projects/deliverables at the same time. Often I would get responses to multiple projects within the same email OR I would want to get a status update on multiple projects and didn't want to send a million separate emails to the same person.

This way I didn't have to determine where to file the email that I was just going to search for later.

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." - Mickey Bergman - Heist (2001)
 

Hah, I'm the opposite. I've got folders for absolutely everything, and rules to move any recurring or remotely predictable items (press releases, internal notices, etc)

For the less defined stuff I just use an "Ad Hoc" folder, then create work in progress subfolders for projects, once wrapped up they stay in their subfolder but that moves into a dated archive (ie Q1-14). Categorization, but more importantly flags, are vital to keeping up with all that stuff.

 

A folder for each day of the week sounds beyond cumbersome, considering you have to move the email elsewhere again once you've dealt with it. Assuming one is using Outlook or something similar, why not just flag the email and enter the due date? It will directly appear in your "Tasks" section in order of priority.

I agree with @"woodywoodford" above, I use folders for each email. I don't generally work on 'a million' projects at a time, so in case an email contains references to multiple projects, I let it stay in the main Inbox folder until I've dealt with it. Thankfully at least in my case I usually receive emails specific to each project, along with the project name in the subject line. That allows me to set up automatic rules which directly route the email into the project folder.

Move along, nothing to see here.
 

So instead of just keeping everything in the inbox you move it to a separate folder that is named something different but essentially is the same thing? Got it.

Like Bateman said why not just flag the emails for the appropriate date?

This to all my hatin' folks seeing me getting guac right now..
 

I'm not a fan of the whole "zero inbox" thing personally. While I could probably use a bit more organization, I think the idea of handling every piece of trash that comes across your inbox on a daily basis is an inefficient use of time. People who do it say it pays off in the "long run" because they are more organized, but anecdotally, i just haven't seen that be the case.

 

I just let them sit in my inbox. Too much work to set all of that crap up anyway. But then again I don't really ever answer or really read my email so I guess it wouldn't matter either way.

Follow the shit your fellow monkeys say @shitWSOsays Life is hard, it's even harder when you're stupid - John Wayne
 

Yes, I have read that book and love its concepts. Unfortunately, his solution for email management left much to be desired in practice. So, I took the initial concept and created this workflow for myself. I have been asked about it by several people and they have found it useful and so I shared it here.

"Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." - Mickey Bergman - Heist (2001)
 

Interesting system but all this moving messages around and clicking and deliberating sounds like a lot of extra effort.

I just keep messages unread until I've dealt with them completely, and I have a search folder for Unread Mail. I don't have thousands of emails per day though. And I put meetings on my calendar for reminders as needed.

 

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