Avoid hoarding email

Yesterday I mentioned my 97% full Gmail inbox – which is my personal, 15-year old email that has just accumulated stuff and barely ever been cleared out (it’s not this email address you reply to).

One way I now deal with email hoarding, is doing a weekly “email triage” – a method I’ve cobbled together from several places including the Getting Things Done book, Jonathan Stark‘s method, several LinkedIn posts, and the Superhuman blog (Superhuman is an email app I used to use).

My goal isn’t complete inbox zero, just decluttered and organised. It takes a little practice, but gets the inbox to zero or close to in about 5-10 minutes and is very liberating when you’ve done it a few times.

Once you’re out of that 97% full situation and are just dealing with a week or so of email, it’s pretty quick. One important thing to note is that if you follow my way below, you’re not actioning anything while in triage (or very little) – you’re moving it somewhere else to be actioned appropriately, on your own time, without keeping you in the inbox and distracting you from clearing it out.

To me, an inbox is kind of a messy todo list that has stuff flying into it randomly all the time, so I much prefer to take control of the things-to-be-done, and do them on my own time rather than when the ping happens.

One of my favourite quotes from I don’t know who, is that an inbox is someone else’s todo list for you – that thought infuriates me, so doing it this way gives me some feeling (or perhaps illusion) of control over my time.

Pre-step 1: I use 3 tools in total:

• The inbox (I use an app called Spark Mail, which sits on top of Gmail to give it more features);
• A todo app (I use My Tasks App);
• and the SMS function of my phone.

Pre-step 2: I now opt for archiving old emails – I used to store emails in folders, but rarely remembered which folders I had, so over 15 years I have hundreds of folders that I now ignore. I usually search for what I need, so simply archiving the email rather than filing it into a folder works perfectly.

Here’s how I triage my email:

• Open the inbox
• Filter if you want, (I don’t)
• One by one, I go down the list and either delete, archive, move, or schedule:
• Delete the junk mail
• Archive or delete stuff I’ve read and don’t need to see again
• When something needs action, I copy the link to that exact email (in Gmail, you just copy the URL in your browser’s address bar) and paste it into the todo app, then immediately archive the email. Later, as I work through my todo list, the link allows me to go back to the email in a click, action it, then archive/delete.
• If it’s something I can action quickly, like a quick yes or thanks or confirm a meeting, I just do it while I’m in triage, then archive/delete.
• If there’s something I need to action on a specific date, I still copy it to my to do app, but this one will get a due date.
• If there’s something I need to action later today or tomorrow, I still move it to the todo app but instead of adding a due date, I’ll schedule an SMS to myself on my phone as a reminder to action it (on Android, you can type a regular SMS to yourself, press and hold the send button, and pick a date and time to send… I imagine iOS does something similar).
• Shortcut keys really help – in Spark Mail you can assign your own or use the defaults, so you just hit “A” to archive, “delete” to delete, etc. Obvious, but really helpful and gets you into the flow quickly. Gmail has shortcuts too but you might have to switch them on in settings.

Notes:

The reason I send an SMS for a today/tomorrow one, but set a due date for later ones, is that if I sent an SMS for anything more than a day from now, I’d probably forget that I’d set that up (just knowing myself).

The Todo list is a daily list I check several times a day. Most things recur daily (writing emails, doing stretches, clearing desktop etc), with these emails-requiring-action at the bottom, which stay there til they’re actioned. The recurring items get ticked-off daily (mostly), then I untick-all the next day and go again. The email ones get deleted once they’re done.

Does that sound like I’m just moving things from one “inbox” to another? Probably. But I don’t like being in my email inbox, so I’d rather not use it as a todo list, especially when things get added to it by other people, sometimes while I’m looking right at it.

And ultimately, it’s solving two problems for me. Clearing my own clutter is the main one, but the second, while it’s barely a drop in the ocean, is reducing the digital waste.

It feels meaningful if I can help a bunch of others do the same – the more that do it, hopefully others will follow 🙂

This is a pretty messy walkthrough – is it helpful? Shoot me any questions that come up.