mixed with to do items, and there is no way to prioritize or keep track of things.
Therefore, my recommendation is to keep your inbox clean.
To keep your inbox clean, you need to have a plan for what you're going to do with every email message you receive. Each possibility has to end with 'delete the message,' or your inbox will start to fill up. In fact, if you don't delete it soon, you'll be stuck going back over old messages to figure out what to do with them. That means you'll read each email message twice (maybe more) before acting on it—not very efficient.
When dealing with interruptions in Chapter 2, we used a system called delegate, record, do. For dealing with email, we have a few more options:
Filter
Delete unread
Read and...
Delete
File
Reply, then delete
Delegate or forward, then delete
Do now, then delete
I know to an experienced email user like you these points seem obvious and self-explanatory, but indulge me. You might know how to manage email, but are you really doing it? The following sections go into more detail and include tips I've picked up along the way.
Filter
Email filters are a big part of my email management. By having email automatically filtered based on content, subject, or whom the email is from, I can set up routines.
The bulk of my email comes from email lists that I subscribe to. I create a folder for each mailing list I'm on and set up automatic filters to file messages from each mailing list to their appropriate folder.
I group the folders into two parent folders or groups. The first group is the folders (mailing lists) I read every day. To me, this is like reading the daily newspaper. I try to keep this group small—small enough that I can read all the messages that accumulate each day in 15 minutes.
The other group of folders is for my less-important mailing lists. For these, if I haven't gotten around to reading the folder by Friday, I empty the entire folder without reading any of the contents. This prevents me from accumulating megabytes of outdated messages. I delete with confidence: if it was really important, I would have seen it elsewhere, too.
I also have one unofficial group of mailing lists. These are the lists that receive messages so rarely that it doesn't make sense to set up a filter for them. They might as well go to my inbox directly. An example of this is the list that announces new releases of the Unix sendmail program. The announcements are rare enough that it's OK to let them go to my inbox, and setting up a filter would be more work than it is worth. Managing a lot of usually empty folders would be a pain.
I have another rule about email lists. Once a month I evaluate the lists I'm subscribed to and unsubscribe from one of them. This is a routine (see Chapter 6) that I schedule for the first of each month. Some months this is easy: I've joined a list that turned out not to be very useful. Other months it's not so easy, but I do it anyway. Otherwise, I'm going to end up on every email list on the planet. This is similar to what some people do to keep their closets organized: when they buy new clothes, they get rid of an equal number of old clothes. Here's a mantra for you:
If you aren't sure if an email list is useful, it isn't.
Delete Unread
The next category of email messages are the ones that I can delete without reading . These are usually maintenance announcements from the building supervisor, spam, or other 'blast' email that I know has little relevance to my life.
When I was at Bell Labs, I would often receive a printed announcement in my office mailbox telling me that construction would be blocking a particular entrance. I would also receive email about this, often multiple times. Of course, if I was driving anywhere near that entrance, I would see tons of construction and signs notifying me to turn back. Eventually, I realized that unless the message mentioned something that affected computers (power, cooling, etc.), I could delete those messages without reading them.
Read and...
Email that we read has to be processed somehow. My goal is to touch each email only once. By
