How to organize your email inbox (and your life).

I recently read a book called “Getting Things Done” which is all about how to organize everything in your life. The book was way too long, obsessively detailed and meandering, but I get something invaluable out of it: how to organize my email inbox and bring all my multitude of projects under control.

The Old Way of (dis)Organization

The way I’d been doing things, first thing when I start work I’d:

1. go through every email and delete all the obvious spams, then
2. tend to emergency requests, then
3. keep all the rest of the email in my inbox until I had worked on it, at which point
4. I’d file it in one of the archive folders I have for every client.

This systems worked fine as long as my email volume was low enough that I could see all my current messages within one screen. But when I started having more than 10 or so projects that I was working on at once, with all their attendant emails, some emails would start to slip off down the bottom of the screen and tend to get forgotten.

The New Way

With the new system, the idea is that the inbox should be treated as just a staging area, and not as a working area. I created three new folders in my email software: DO NEXT, LESS URGENT, and MONDAY REVIEW.

DO NEXT is for emails that I will work on “next”, or today. LESS URGENT are for those emails that will be gotten to whenever the DO NEXT items are finished. MONDAY REVIEW are for those emails for which I may or may not want to take action on in the future.

Now, when I start work, instead of keeping all my emails in my inbox as I work on them, I use my new system:

1. First I quickly glance at each email in my inbox, one at a time.
2. If I can do whatever it takes to respond to the email in two minutes or less, I do it right then.
3. If it just needs to be archived or deleted, I do that. Otherwise, if the email will require more than two minutes of work, I sort it into one of the three new folders.
4. Then I go to work by diving into the DO NEXT folder and doing what’s there.
5. At the end of the work day, I go into the LESS URGENT folder and do any quickies in there, and move any of the emails into the DO NEXT folder that I think I should.

On Mondays, I go into the MONDAY REVIEW folder and see if anything in there should be acted on, and if so, I move it into the DO NEXT folder.

I’ve gone from having an email inbox that would get to an empty state once every several months, to having one that is empty after about ten minutes of my starting work, every day.

Useful Adjuncts

I have a number of other tools that tie into my organized email inbox. These include:

• A physical inbox for paper action items.
• A physical filing cabinet.
• A list of all my projects (on paper).
• A dry-erase board for writing important ongoing reminders.
• A date and time specific automated reminder system.

PHYSICAL INBOX
The physical inbox has four racks: (1) inbox, (2) do next, (3) less urgent, and (4) Monday review. As you can see, it mirrors my email inbox categories, and I treat everything in it the same way. If something can be done in two minutes or less, I do it right away. If not, I categorize it for later processing. I’ll also throw things in here like a book to return to a friend, an iPod user’s guide to file, a shopping list, letters to mail, and notes to myself about things that I need to do in “real life”.

PHYSICAL FILING CABINET
This sits right next to me — indeed everything in my office is within hand’s reach except for my book case. In my particular case, I don’t handle too much paper as part of my work, so most of the files are personal.

A LIST OF ALL MY PROJECTS
A project is defined as anything that requires more than two steps to complete. In my case, these are mostly the names of websites I have to create. But they can also include writing that next newsletter and sending it, or submitting such and such a form to city hall, or pruning the plum tree, or whatever.

The key here is to write down what the specific next step is I need to do to get the project moving. It could be “call Anita and ask her to decide on a color for the logo”, or “go to hardware store and buy work gloves”.

I keep this list right next to me, and every day I review it. I see if it’s a complete collection of all my projects, work-related or personal. I cross off finished projects. I cross off finished Next Steps for projects and write in new Next Steps. I like having it on paper and I enjoy the physical feel of crossing a project off when it’s done. When the paper gets too messy, I rewrite the whole list on a fresh piece.

DRY ERASE BOARD
I used to use this for keeping my list of projects, but since I had to stand up to write on it or erase anything, I tended not to use it. So now I keep my projects list right at my side on a piece of paper, and I use the board for writing reminders to myself about things I often forget. I also write my general and specific goals.

A REMINDER SYSTEM
Most people use a calendar as their reminder system. I also use a calendar, but since I’m a techie it’s on my computer, and I set it to email me to remind me about upcoming events or things I need to take action on. I can also set it to email me once a month, or once a week.

Altogether these organizational elements have transformed the way I work so that I no longer feel like there are things I’m forgetting. I may still have things that I can’t get to any time soon, but at least now it’s due to my prioritizing my time rather than through negligence. I know the status of every single project I’m working on.

How to Go Through the Spam Folder in Seconds

This section is only for those folks who use dedicated email software (Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Mac Mail) and have SpamAssassin or something similar installed on their server.

For people who get a ton of email, part of the drudge is weeding out the real email from the spam. Fortunately, these days most email programs will weed out the spam for you. However, it’s still necessary to look at your spam folder in case there are some legitimate messages that got in there mistakenly.

In my case, my email server uses a script called SpamAssassin that tags every message it thinks is spam with the header *** SPAM ***. SpamAssassin is set to a low threshold so that it lets some spam through, but it never tags any real mail as spam (in my experience). It catches about 95% of spam.

This is useful because I can then look at my spam folder and quickly sort every message by its subject line. All the ones with the SPAM header, I have found, have all truly been spam, and I can ignore them. The remaining few messages without the SPAM header that are in the junk folder are usually all spam, but sometimes one of them is real. By sorting by subject to have all the SPAM-marked messages segregated from the non-spam-marked ones, the task of checking the spam folder for legitimate messages takes about five seconds, even with hundreds of total spams.

To rephrase: SpamAssassin marks all messages it thinks are spam so they begin with the subject line *** SPAM ***. SpamAssassin isn’t very hard-nosed so it lets about 5% of spam through, but the benefit of this is that it never tags legitimate email as spam.

Now, your email software will have a built-in spam filter, and it will send all the SpamAssassin messages, plus some additional messages it thinks are spam into your junk folder. It’s these additional messages you need to look at. Go into your junk folder and sort all the messages by subject line. All the ones that begin with *** SPAM *** can be ignored. But the ones without this header may be legitimate, so you should scan those. Fortunately, even with hundreds of spam messages, there will only be five to 20 of those, and that’s a quick scan.

As you can see in the picture below, this junk folder is sorted by Subject, and it has 46 junk messages total. The yellow area shows the spams that may contain a legitimate message (about 10% of all the messages). There are only a few here in the yellow section, which takes just seconds to scan. The red area shows all the true SPAMs that I can ignore, even if there are hundreds of them, because I trust SpamAssassin on its low threshold setting.

Written December 18, 2007 on 1:15 am in category(s):
Email, Helpful Hints | Comments Off