Downloaded an interesting white paper from Mark Hurst called “Managing Incoming E-mail. He argues the way to measure email is not by volume (or number) of incoming emails, since many of them will be spam, but by message count or the number of emails waiting in the inbox. He advocates keeping your inbox empty and not using it as an ad hoc to-do list, calendar or filing system.
He has a three step program for managing the size of the inbox (which shows the relative importance of the email problem to a 12 step program for a problem like alcoholism). His first step is to delete all spam. Then he recommends reading any personal email and deleting it after the appropriate action is taken. The final step in his method is to sort the email oldest to newest message and engage each email in turn. Engaging an email involves:
- scanning newsletters, (except in the case of The Siebel Observer which should be read very carefully) then deleting them,
- reading, possibly filing, and then deleting FYI emails,
- applying the two minute rule to to-dos, (if it takes less then two minutes, do it right there and then) otherwise add it to a to-do list;
For more information see Mark's site goodexperience.com
