My three main Inboxes are getting out of control. While I manage to reply in a reasonable manner to most of the email I get that’s directed to me personally, I tend to get very slack at filing things away or deleting them, perhaps partly because I think at some stage I’ll need to find them urgently again — to contribute a point to a group discussion, or read again to enforce a point or otherwise act.
The result? Mailbox one: over 1000 items; Mailbox two: 244; Mailbox three: 702.
Which of course means I can’t find urgent things easily.
Robert Scoble wrote a few days ago about “declaring email bankruptcy“. Thankfully things aren’t quite that desperate.
But I think it’s time for a big clearout. Maybe I’ll file away most of it into some kind of Inbox Archive, and get more strict about filing/deleting as I read, so what remains in the Inboxes is genuinely just what I need to respond to.
2 replies on “Out of control Inboxes”
Use either Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop Search, and forget about deleting/managing emails forever. Just dump em all in a folder and let the search monkeys find it all for you.
I use the MS offering, because I couldn’t stop Google indexing everything on my computer… but Google integrates with Gmail nicely.
One of my friends has figured it out: “TRISH READ THIS!!!” is the subject line!
It works ..!