The Overstuffed Inbox

We all have had to deal with an overstuffed email inbox. This might have been when we started GTD or perhaps when we have not been diligent in keeping up with our regular email processing. Here are some tips from Dwayne Melancon on how to get through the job of processing an overstuffed email inbox:

Consider temporarily following a “one minute rule” for handling messages (instead of the "two minute rule" from the Getting Things Done book). During this process, I used the one minute rule for two reasons:

-I had too many messages to afford myself that much time per message
-I wasn’t very good at judging two minutes, and ended up spending 5+ minutes on things I thought were going to be two minute actions.

Sort by sender, then...
-Consider deleting:
---Messages from people you don’t know
---Message from people who are no longer with the company
---Newsletters you’ll never read (be honest)
---Messages from people who only send you lame jokes and hoaxes (you know who they are by now)
---Messages from benevolent Nigerians or foreign national lotteries claiming to have money for you

Sort by Subject / Topic / Conversation, then...
-Delete:
---Issues you don’t care about
---Outdated newsletters that are still there from the first pass
-Delete or file:
---Issues that have been resolved
---Decide whether you need to file the whole thread or just the one with the conclusion
-File things you want to retain for reference, like:
---Interesting factoids that you want to retain for reference
---Information for personnel files
---Information pertinent to your job, goals, hobbies, etc.
---Funny stuff
---Praise and criticism (I file these under Kudos, with a subfolder for Antikudos)
---References to useful resources

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