In the days of fast email search engines such as Lookout and Bloomba should you bother trying to categorise or file the emails in your Inbox. Marc Orchant’s post on the matter got me thinking. I believe the Inbox should be empty and regularly seek the state of Inbox zero.
The argument for not filing says that you incrementally save masses of time and dollars by not filing. The search engine and some well selected keywords will be much quicker than you can mentally categorise, create new categories as needed etc. That’s right. It will save you time and dollars. But there are some other things to consider.
Forget the email on your computer and imagine a desk covered with thousands of printed emails instead. It doesn’t make me feel good and the same effect occurs with email in an Inbox as well. Read it, do what it needs you to do and then get rid of it. The question is then where to?
A great choice is Deleted Items or a rubbish bin. If you don’t need it, bin it. The next choice is a folder which acts like a filing cabinet. Mine is called ‘repository’. All emails I need to keep are shuffled off to there. However, and this is where the best of both worlds can be found, I don’t do any further categorisation. The search engine is employed.
The solution is not one or the other. It’s a combination of both.