Years ago, I wrote about how I had created a plan to achieve Inbox Zero. For some months, that did work for me. However, as time went by, I was receiving evermore emails and soon my system failed, with tons of unread, unprocessed emails piling up in my inbox. So, a few months ago, I setup a new system. This achieves that same core purpose of Inbox Zero, but a little differently.
The goal I set out to achieve was to make sure that I addressed, read, processed all email I needed to in a timely manner… WITHOUT having to sort through all the email that may not be important enough to address in a timely manner. I am going to call this the “Three Folder System”.
It is simple, and it is based on 3 rules (1 of them is a more a set of rules). I created 3 folders in my Inbox; they are called:
- To me
- CC me
- Important
As it is obvious, the first rule moves all email which has my email ID (or any aliases) in the “to” field, to the folder “To me”. The second rule does the same for any email in which I am in the “cc/bcc”.
The third rule is a set of rules where I move to the “important” folder any mail I receive in which I am not in a To or CC (where a mail is sent to distribution groups, etc.) but the email is either:
- sent by certain people (my bosses, key sales people in the company, my wife, etc.)
- or sent by anyone to critical distribution groups (important organizational functions or projects that I am monitoring)
Now, everyday I make sure that there are no unread mails left in these 3 folders. And any mail that I can’t work on right away, I flag as a TO-DO item. Every week I make sure that I don’t have any unread email left in the remaining emails (which don’t make it to these folders) – by typically just scanning over the subjects of these emails and the first few lines.
I go through TO-DO items as soon as I can based on the time I have on hand. Automatically, the most urgent matters are given the highest priority in terms of sorting them out – which sometimes means that some of the less urgent ones have to wait for a long time before getting done. But the system works.
I hope it continues to work forever.