Oogiem
Registered
The question I have is how much time does it take to maintain the folder system vs how much time does it save me? If I only need to pull that stuff rarely but it takes me an hour a week to maintain that system I've got 52 hours a year into the filing system. Say I have to pull that data back out once a month and if it was not sorted it would take me an hour to find it all. That's 12 hours spent vs 52 hours to make it faster. Not worth it IMO. There are many more things I'd rather do with 40 hours than spend them filing. Now plug in your numbers and decide that way.So while finding a particular item if you know what you want may be better through just search, I think the benefit of using folders is when you want to see everything on a particular topic or review an entire project or area of focus and go through all the emails in a folder or set of folders to see if there are any new next actions, things to be trashed, projects, etc in there. You may only do this occasionally but I think that's where the real added value of folders comes in.
Look at the lifetime cost of sorting into folders vs the benefit.