Should your inbox be empty?
An interesting recent post at blog.pmarca.com recommended checking email only twice a day and ending each of these sessions with a completely empty inbox.
Should you do that? As I discuss in one of next week's NW Fusion newsletters, I believe the answer is no. In many ways, email is more database than communications tool, a repository of unstructured content that you can add to at will simply be sending me an email. If content is unwanted and unusable, such as spam, obviously it should be discarded. However, we all receive content in email that might not need a response right away, or that might be more useful when aggregated with other content.
In short, an email inbox is a growing archive of content that is more useful the bigger it gets. Paring it down to nothing each time you check email will prevent you from deriving much of the value that email provides.
posted by Michael D. Osterman at
6/21/2007 02:04:00 AM
4 Comments:
I know a highly effective executive that handled his email this exact way. He created sub folders for email he knew he might need to reference later and deleted everything else. He did save his deleted items however in his archives. I have never known a more detail oriented executive who never missed a thing!
I guess this is the beauty of Outlook: you really have so very many ways of handling things and still accomplishing the same thing. Yes, you are right; email is a database of sorts. Where you choose to store and reference those things is highly subjective. In my opinion, the single greatest value any of the archiving tools on the marketplace today offer is a way to index and search that database no matter how the user decided to manage it personally.
June 21, 2007 7:26 AM
well said deannie.
People who use webmail clients such as gmail, are more likely to have an inbox with a database full of unorganized data. But if one of the benefits of having email is to use it as a database, then what good is all that information if you have no efficient way of getting to it? It is impractical to score through hundreds of emails to find that one email you got 7 months ago.
I suggest that everybody does in fact use a program such as outlook that will allow you to organize your email into folders. Once you have such a program I do think it is a good idea to leave your inbox empty after each email session; unless there is a specific rule for items left in your inbox. I suggest that when checking your email you always do one of the following:
1) delete it
2) sort it into the appropriate folder
3) add it to your to-do list ( I always make a to-do list each morning and add to it as the day goes on)
I would not suggest to leave any messages in your inbox unless absolutely necessary. I'm sure you will find tackling your email much less chaotic.
June 21, 2007 9:48 AM
I agree with Michael. Until a few years ago, I used to organize all incoming messages into folders by subject matter and delete the Spam and superfluous mails with the goal of having an empty inbox at the end of the day. In essence, I was using my inbox as a to-do list. This system became too difficult to manage after a while. I fell behind, messages got mis-categorized and I could not find older emails quick enough.
I then discovered the “Google approach” to email – keeping a flat inbox - using search, sort, flagging and tagging. While I personally don’t view Gmail as a viable option for my daily email needs yet, traditional email clients such as Lotus Notes and MS-Outlook already have all the built-in capabilities to make this approach very effective.
June 27, 2007 7:51 PM
I try and usually succeed in keeping my inbox empty. Anything that needs action either gets acted on then and there or pasted into my calendar or to-dos, and in any event filed and removed from the inbox.
I also find it helpful to have very strong filtering such that anything from anyone besides colleagues and other selected senders goes to Junk Email automatically. From there I can resurrect it back to my inbox or more likely delete it in batch.
October 26, 2007 10:54 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home