Several colleagues have asked me for the secret to my email management success. I went through a period last year where I managed three separate mailboxes which together could generate between 100 and 150 messages a day. As a matter of survival I had to take my email management skills to an entirely new level. And now I’m ready to share the secret to my success with the world. I’ve decided to reprise the obligatory desktop photo technique to illustrate my approach.

You too can be a winner

1. Years ago I started out managing email in the traditional nested-folder way; creating what I thought would be logical folder structures and diligently filing processed email into those folders. As everyone knows by now this turns out to be a terrible way of managing email because you keep on changing your mind about what is ‘logical’ and your organization needs change over time so you end up with groups of nested and nested folders. Some folders are by customer, other are by topic, some are by priority etc etc. I do have to say that I never fell victim to the most primitive folder organization concept – storing by sender. And let’s not forget about the case where you end up putting an email into two folders by making a copy – yuck. With several groups of three-deep folder hierarchies that doesn’t work and the folders that I still have are largely artifacts of failed archives. I think we can all agree that nobody still thinks that crazy-complicated folders are the way to go, and for my money Gmail-style tags are not much better.

2. Some of my colleagues think that my mad email skillz are due to my ability to organize emails by conversation[1] and several have asked me how I do it. They are invariably deflated to find out that it is a standard menu option and not due to any special skill or tool that I have. Conversations are an ok way to temporarily collapse a bunch of emails in your Inbox to reduce scrolling but are worthless for anything else. So no – organizing into conversations isn’t the secret.

3. Others have commented on how impressive my To-Do bar is, thinking that I use all sorts of follow up flags and tasks to manage my day. Not so – those are just a list of meetings that I’ve arbitrarily put there because what I really want to see is the little calendar above them. The calendar is useful – the list is just there. I rarely look at it.

4. What about archiving and search? This photo doesn’t show it clearly but I use Google Desktop Search and archive email regularly. Yes, I do use search to find emails and it does work well since I tend to remember fragments of conversations or keywords that, in combination with senders and receivers, help me to quickly find archived emails again. But this is still not the secret – not yet what has revolutionized my mailbox.

So what is my secret? What is the magic ingredient, the Tao technique that I’ve learnt from my three-mailbox days? Is it mind maps? No. What about egg timers for times of day to diligently read and clean? Nope. Macros or some sort of custom-written code? Also not.

5. The secret that I have discovered is this bad boy down here; the Delete button.
And not just delete into the recycle bin and then archive. I mean delete with a capital D; gone. What I do is to aggressively delete stuff, I actively archive about a quarter of my email and the rest goes into the bin. And once every two weeks the bin gets wiped. I feel so much better, lighter, younger even.

Anita made a great point the other day about photos on Facebook and the importance of being able to curate what you put up there. In the words of Tim Gunn, what is needed is an editing eye. And in the case of email it doesn’t just mean editing yourself but editing other people. Go ahead, delete those emails – edit your colleagues, you’ll feel so much better once you do.