Last week I had one of those classic Homer J. "Doh!" moments.
I've been struggling with managing e-mail for some time given the large volume of e-mail I routinely recieve. (150-300+ per day.) The challenge I've always had is that I've never been comfortable deleting much e-mail as I've been saved too many times by being able to go back through historical e-mail archives and find the relevant discussion thread...
A lot of my e-mail processing time was spent filing non-actional e-mails into my general reference e-mail system. I have been using the GTD Add-in which is helpful but filing each e-mail still takes some time. (I was filing by project.) I would typically save about 80% of the e-mail I get. It all went into the same folder in an outlook .pst called e-mail, and I have one archive for each of the last five years I've worked at this company. (Previous archives are in my office at home burned to disk...). The single folder made searching relatively easy. I found putting e-mail in folders by project doesn't work well for me.
I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but recently I created a rule to file a copy of every incoming e-mail to my archive folder. Now I know the e-mail has already been filed and when I realize the e-mail is not actionable I can just hit delete secure in the knowledge that If I need to look it up its stored in my archive (the right place, permenantly, and for all-time as David says...). I lose the project tag, but in the trade-off, I've cut my inbox processing time roughly in half... Since I spend much more time processing than searching, it's an easy trade to make...
Doh!
I've been struggling with managing e-mail for some time given the large volume of e-mail I routinely recieve. (150-300+ per day.) The challenge I've always had is that I've never been comfortable deleting much e-mail as I've been saved too many times by being able to go back through historical e-mail archives and find the relevant discussion thread...
A lot of my e-mail processing time was spent filing non-actional e-mails into my general reference e-mail system. I have been using the GTD Add-in which is helpful but filing each e-mail still takes some time. (I was filing by project.) I would typically save about 80% of the e-mail I get. It all went into the same folder in an outlook .pst called e-mail, and I have one archive for each of the last five years I've worked at this company. (Previous archives are in my office at home burned to disk...). The single folder made searching relatively easy. I found putting e-mail in folders by project doesn't work well for me.
I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but recently I created a rule to file a copy of every incoming e-mail to my archive folder. Now I know the e-mail has already been filed and when I realize the e-mail is not actionable I can just hit delete secure in the knowledge that If I need to look it up its stored in my archive (the right place, permenantly, and for all-time as David says...). I lose the project tag, but in the trade-off, I've cut my inbox processing time roughly in half... Since I spend much more time processing than searching, it's an easy trade to make...
Doh!