Your Inbox is Huge!
Tags: Software
I have always been odd when it comes to e-mail. Specifically, my Inbox has almost always been empty or nearly so. Since the dawn of e-mail, I've treated messages in my Inbox as to-do items, and I don't like to have a lot of outstanding to do's. I can't understand how people can work with gigantic inboxes, with thousands of messages, including many unread messages (how do you know if you've missed something important?) From a technical point of view. if you have 20,000 messages in your Inbox (you know who you are) it's going to take longer to open it and do anything with it. It's going to take longer to index the view, search it, etc. In Lotus Notes, if I have to refresh or fixup your mail file it's going to take a lot longer to open then next time.
From a productivity point of view, how can you keep track of what you have read and what you still have to operate on? For many years I tried to keep my Inbox as empty as possible. If I got a message that I needed to deal with it stayed in my Inbox until I responded or turned it into a real to do, or did whatever I needed to do with it, after which the email either got deleted or filed into the proper folder. I would usually end up with 10-20 messages just sitting there, but sometimes I would get it down to empty.
Since last year, though, my Inbox is almost always empty, thanks to David Allen's Getting Things Done principles. I'm not going to dive into all that here, and all the benefits you can get, but in a nutshell, I now have four additional folders in my e-mail:
-@Action
-@Read-Review
-@Someday-Maybe
-@Waiting For
They're named that way so they sort up at the top of my e-mail. It's pretty obvious what happens to my incoming e-mail now. If I deal with it right away, no problem - it gets filed in the correct client folder or wherever it belongs. If I'm not going to deal with it immediately, it goes into one of the above 4 folders, usually into -@Action. All four are perused occasionally, with -@Action getting the bulk of the attention. Sometimes when I respond to someone I'll Send and File it into -@Waiting For so I remember that I'm expecting a response to something important.
One of my favorite aspects of this method (and really, I can't stress enough that I'm just scratching the surface of Getting Things Done) is that I don't have to constantly see old things in my Inbox that I am eventually going to need to deal with. Especially when I'm away from my office and checking my e-mail via mobile phone, I just don't need to see the old stuff. That alone has cut down on a lot of work stress and has increased my productivity.
So next time you open your Inbox, ask yourself, is what you're seeing there really what you want to see there?
I have always been odd when it comes to e-mail. Specifically, my Inbox has almost always been empty or nearly so. Since the dawn of e-mail, I've treated messages in my Inbox as to-do items, and I don't like to have a lot of outstanding to do's. I can't understand how people can work with gigantic inboxes, with thousands of messages, including many unread messages (how do you know if you've missed something important?) From a technical point of view. if you have 20,000 messages in your Inbox (you know who you are) it's going to take longer to open it and do anything with it. It's going to take longer to index the view, search it, etc. In Lotus Notes, if I have to refresh or fixup your mail file it's going to take a lot longer to open then next time.
From a productivity point of view, how can you keep track of what you have read and what you still have to operate on? For many years I tried to keep my Inbox as empty as possible. If I got a message that I needed to deal with it stayed in my Inbox until I responded or turned it into a real to do, or did whatever I needed to do with it, after which the email either got deleted or filed into the proper folder. I would usually end up with 10-20 messages just sitting there, but sometimes I would get it down to empty.
Since last year, though, my Inbox is almost always empty, thanks to David Allen's Getting Things Done principles. I'm not going to dive into all that here, and all the benefits you can get, but in a nutshell, I now have four additional folders in my e-mail:
-@Action
-@Read-Review
-@Someday-Maybe
-@Waiting For
They're named that way so they sort up at the top of my e-mail. It's pretty obvious what happens to my incoming e-mail now. If I deal with it right away, no problem - it gets filed in the correct client folder or wherever it belongs. If I'm not going to deal with it immediately, it goes into one of the above 4 folders, usually into -@Action. All four are perused occasionally, with -@Action getting the bulk of the attention. Sometimes when I respond to someone I'll Send and File it into -@Waiting For so I remember that I'm expecting a response to something important.
One of my favorite aspects of this method (and really, I can't stress enough that I'm just scratching the surface of Getting Things Done) is that I don't have to constantly see old things in my Inbox that I am eventually going to need to deal with. Especially when I'm away from my office and checking my e-mail via mobile phone, I just don't need to see the old stuff. That alone has cut down on a lot of work stress and has increased my productivity.
So next time you open your Inbox, ask yourself, is what you're seeing there really what you want to see there?
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Comments
Posted by Luis At 11:01:17 AM On 04/09/2009 | - Website - |
Posted by Sheila At 12:26:21 PM On 04/09/2009 | - Website - |