The system I (previously) advocated on the website, with very neatly organised folders, was in a work context. Very busy $300M project with dozens of interacting parties, a fiendishly complex schedule, and lots of people who say they’ll do a thing and then don’t.
But then it’s your fault that they didn’t. And this might cost you real money. Aha! Now we have a problem.
It shouldn’t have been this way. It wasn’t ‘healthy’. But that’s how it was. And so being the individual in my team who could recall, almost flawlessly, any email: utterly priceless.
Partially because those emails acted as mini-contracts. You told us you’d have the widget painted red by the 27th July. ‘No I didn’t!’ Slides email across table…
And partially just because so much organisational knowledge exists in email. Again, it shouldn’t. But it does. You ask someone in April how to do [really complicated one-off process] and then you’re not ready to implement that until July and now … dang. Where was it?
This was my primary frustration with email: you know you have the knowledge, but you can’t find it.
(This has got much worse with the advent of MS Teams.)
So in that job, for a few years, I organised essentially every email in to a folder. It probably took 10% of my work day. Every day. But I was the team’s librarian. My boss was well aware. It was a cost of doing business that paid for itself.
Now, that’s quite a unique situation. I do not do that today. Here’s a quick overview of my current strategy, which works okay. I’m inspired by @clappingcactus and will probably adopt his ideas.
1. Never truly ‘delete’ an email.
By ‘delete’ we mean ‘archive’. It’s always over there if you need to recall it with search.
This means that you never have to worry about removing something from your inbox. You don’t have to consider that action for even the briefest moment. Because it’s over there in your archive, just in case.
I do this by having my mail provider forward all incoming mail to another address, archive@example.com. My mail client then POPs (yeah, POP!) that off to a folder, and a rule marks it as read. I never see it. It’s just there.
The key is that this is happening server-side. I can switch mail clients, do whatever else: every email is forwarded, by the server, to my archive mailbox.
2. Use your mail app’s features
I use macOS’ Mail.app just because it’s there and I’m used to it. It’s fine.
I use its ‘Filter messages in this mailbox’ feature heavily. So currently … lol, okay … my personal email, which is mostly junk/mailing lists/receipts, has 1,879 messages. hello@johnnydecimal has 734. But I don’t care, because if they’re read, it just means I haven’t cleaned up yet.
I leave those that need my attention unread and then when I hit the filter button to ‘only show unread’, now I have 3 emails. I use Mail’s unified inbox view so I don’t care which mailbox they’re in.
2,613 to 3. Quite a difference.
3. Don’t forget to clean up!
Okay so I’m probably overdue. I tend to leave at least the last few weeks of history in my inbox because I do flick back to those messages and it’s convenient. But it looks like I’m due a cleanup.
Thanks to rule 1., that’s easy. I’ll do it now. Cmd-A, delete. Gone from the ‘inbox’ … but still in the archive.
This mostly keeps me sane. My relationship with email is that it is a necessary evil.
yup it’s in his workbook… and I laughed when i saw it — cuz it’s exactly the way I feel about emails when I’m vacating, and especially about repeat phone calls like… I tried calling yesterday and nobody’s answering — duh 
Would love to hear (your and others) experience too.
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