philcrissman.com

I get between 20 and 40 emails per day at work — none of them are spam. Chances are, you’re in a similar situation — depending on your role, you may receive even more email than this.

This means unless we’re very diligent, the inbox can be stuffed with over a hundred emails in a matter of days.

I don’t know about you, but an inbox that is that full stymies me. I hate it. I hate to look at it. At best, it’s frustrating and just feels messy — at worst (for example, if I already have several projects pulling at me) I can get the “deer-in-headlights” feeling just looking at the inbox.

On the other hand, catagorizing and filing email in offline folders is a task in and of itself. If an email requires you to do something, you need to be sure you’ll look at it again. If an email contains some information you might need someday, you need to be sure you can locate it again when you need it. What this means is that the task of organizing your folders so that your saved email makes sense can be as overwhelming as just contemplating that bursting-at-the-seams inbox. Not to mention trying to determine which bucket a particular email should go into; what if it doesn’t perfectly fit a given category? Do you create a new category?

All of this thinking takes time, and while a certain amount of planning for organization is good, there is a point at which it begins to waste time. It’s usually at this point that you’ll start slacking on organizing that inbox, because it’s simply too taxing to go through it all, and you’re left once again with an enormous, unmanageable inbox.

At least, if you’re like me, that’s what happens.

So here’s my simple solution. I create a folder offline called Inbox, and at the end of the day, whatever is still sitting in my inbox gets transferred to the Offline Inbox.

At first glance, this may seem like a cop-out — after all, isn’t this just trading one unmanageable mass of email for another, while creating the illusion of a clean inbox?

It turns out that the answer is no, and that this actually works surprisingly well.

What it means is that everything in my “real” (live) inbox is actually new, and that it’s always a comparitively short list; 20-30 emails at most.

It’s also easy to find anything recently sent to me, as I know that it will all be in the Offline Inbox — every last bit of it. When I actually have a few moments, I file the items in the Offline Inbox. If I only get to a few at a time, that’s okay. Usually there is at least one point during the week where I can sit down and actually do this properly. That way, everything that leaves the Offline Inbox is either going to a folder that makes sense, so I know I can find it again, or it’s being deleted. Eventually, it’s empty again, too — if only just for a little while.

This small, almost trivial, step might not seem like it would be very effective. It might just depend on your personality type; for me, seeing actual whitespace in my inbox, or at list a list that can be scrolled down with one click, is a tremendous load off my mind. If your inbox is stressing you out, give it a shot — it’s important to get things done, but it’s counter-productive to be constantly stressed out.