I used to have serious issues with my email account management skills. The biggest problem was that when I get loads of mail, I answer this, that, leave one out, leave one for next week and so on. If I saw an email I know I didn’t need to answer I didn’t even click on it. This resulted in widespread chaos and generally me being unable to follow my emails.

Since then I devised my own methods for keeping a tab on my inbox, and actually I never have unread messages, I very rarely keep a message for more than 1 day in my inbox actually, take a look on the next page to see how. Keep in mind I get about 20-40 emails a day, if you get a lot more some other rules may apply, I’ll talk about those in a later post.

There are basically two things managing your emails boils down to. One is managing the constant inflow of emails, the other is taking care of archiving in different ways (tagging, categories, folders, etc). My method takes care of the later by actualy not using anything, other than the archive button in Gmail, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

If you want to effectively manage yourself, when you get a new email do the following. When you get a new email ask yourself if you need to answer it. If yes and it will only take a few minutes do so right away. Once you’ve done so, archive the email, get it out of your inbox. Why? Well if you get a reply, it will be in the inbox anyway with the whole conversation, so until then you have a cleaner inbox.

If you don’t need to answer the email archive it if you need the info in it, or delete it. Ask yourself if you really, really need to keep that email lying around. I have gotten used to deleting emails, not because I’ll run out of space, but because it’s good management practice.

Finally, as you see I don’t use any tools like tags and folders. The reason is that I rarely have to search my emails and if I do I can either remember the sender, or the text, or the file name, or extension or something, I have no need for any categorization. If you can’t live without this, just quickly assign categories before you archive.

The hardest thing is to decide which message can be answered quickly and which can’t, and then actually not answering that right away. I have to say I’m not entirely consistent with this one. The good practice would be to assign an hour a day or something to answer longer emails However, what if it’s urgent, or what if you aren’t doing anything important at the time? If I’m really immersed in something I don’t answer these, but if I’m not I would for example suspend writing this post in mid sentence. I don’t think you should follow any rules you find on the net about this particular practice, do what feels good to you.