Quick Tip: Efficiently Manage Your Email

If you are anything like me you process most information through your email inbox. Reminders, tasks and requests flow into my mail client at an incredible rate and traditionally I’ve used an elloborate filing system to process it.

After reading (and then re-reading) David Allen’s Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity it dawned on me my futile attempt to manage it this way was utter madness.

Here is my simple email process as it now stands.

1. Do the action for anything that will take 2 mins or less.
2. Create a new task and define the next step (important!) from each email that needs action.
3. Create a new task as a reminder for anything that can be deferred until a suitable time.
4. Forward anything that needs someone else to action and delete it immediately (trust others).
5. File anything that you may want to pick up in the future but don’t have time for at the moment.
6. File anything else under clients or suppliers, don’t use sub folders as a good search tool will find any specific email you may need in the future.
7. Delete everything else.

Ongoing and this is important, review tasklists from no.2 and no.3 daily and do, file or delete as above. Monitor folder created from no.5 on a monthly basis.

I’ve not had an empty inbox since 1994 and now it is. I’ve even gone as far as archiving all email that is older than 6 months and I now have a happy, clean and manageable mailbox. Reducing stress of it being there and the backup requirements on our infrastructure.

I’m off to tell our clients.