I’m trying a new plan to attempt to keep my email inbox at or near zero.
One of my challenges in going through email, especially if it stacks up a lot in one or two days, is deciding what I need to keep. There are a lot of emails I may want to refer back to, but determining which ones and how to categorize them starts to seem like more trouble than it’s worth.
My new idea, which I’m currently testing to see how it works, is to create three new folders/labels:
- 1 week
- 1 month
- 1 year
The idea is (hopefully) to look at any new email as it comes in and ask, “Do I need to save this?” If not, delete. If yes, then, the question become: How long? Then stash it in the “1 week”, “1 month”, or “1 year” folder, depending on how long I think the information in it may actually be relevant. (This assumes I don’t already have a folder or label where this email “belongs”). I’m not too worried about finding emails within each folder, as search has become pretty good, both within gmail and within Postbox (it’s a little better in Gmail, so I can always pop into the browser if I’m having trouble finding something).
The next step is to simply review the “1 week” folder every Monday; if something doesn’t absolutely need to be there, it gets deleted (if no longer relevant) or pushed to the “1 month” folder. Same steps for the “1 month” folder, but on the first of the month. Ditto for the 1 year; if I haven’t looked an email for a year, I’m going to assume it’s either a “delete forever” or a “keep forever” email, and either trash or stash it accordingly.
It’s hardly a “43 folders” level of organization, but it might be Just Enough to stay near inbox zero. We’ll see how it works.
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