Ahh, the age old question … how to manage your email inbox? As of a month ago, I made a switch. One month later, I’m still happy, so I thought I’d write about it.
For the past 10 years, I have carefully crafted a taxonomy and meticulously filed any email that I thought I might need to reference again. As my email volume grew, and the number of organizations, activities, etc. that I involve myself in grew, the amount of time this took grew correspondingly. As of a month ago I had 29 top-level entries, along with the default inbox, trash, and Sent Items. Of these 29, 5 have a combined total of 45 sub-folders, and some of these sub-folders have sub-sub-folders.
Filing takes time, and I didn’t always keep up, so my inbox would grow huge, making it an almost impossibly large job to tackle and file it. I used to dread the job, and yet I would feel constantly behind because my inbox wasn’t clean.
The worst part was that occasionally I would start off with a naming scheme within a folder, that turned out to be wrong. I’d either end up with folders with one message in them (jumped the gun on creating a category), or three folders that have similar related things in them (they started out different but the threads converged). So, in some cases, retrieving a message was still hard. And, because the dropdown list of folders was so long, occasionally I would drop a message in the wrong folder. Sometimes I would notice when I did this, and go dig it out and put it where it belongs. But I have occasionally found errors that I didn’t catch.
What a drag it all was.
So, as part of a large rework of personal communication strategy last month that I’ve previously talked about — I ditched it all. All historical, painstakingly crafted archives were saved off and archived. My new scheme is leave things in my inbox until I process them (reply, read, whatever), and then save anything I might want again one day into a single large folder called “Saved”. Then I can simply search to find any email I want. Evolution, my email client, has a very sophisticated search capability, as do most modern clients. You can search by sender, recipient, text in body, text anywhere, and any combination of the above. And, the speed of modern computers means it’s pretty efficient.
I’ve now had to go digging for 4 or 5 “saved” emails. I find with search I am actually finding them faster than by opening folders and sub-folders and scrolling through messages. And the savings of time in filing is simply *huge*. It’s a little odd to let go of the need to file, but it’s been very freeing.
Search beats File.
I’ve thought a lot about doing something similar, but even with all the advanced search algorithms of today I’m not convinced I could find what I need to find when I need to find it.
Even something as simple as finding a certain message from a certain friend would not be so simple when such friend is always changing email addresses (and not supplying a Full Name). Now they are all in a single folder.
I also keep all messages related to a project in a particular folder. There would be no easy way to search for such messages, as they could have come from any number of addresses and will often not have any mention of the name of the project we’re working on.
Google Mail’s idea of labels (like tags) isn’t bad. You can attach more than one to a message, obviating the need to save it in more than one folder.