Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [30]
This section includes many tips particularly relevant to email for work as well as ideas that will help you build a better relationship with your personal email.
Email basics
First, a few basic principles (and a thank-you to Merlin Mann and others who have taught me many things about managing email):
Start your day with energy, not email. Take a moment to clear your head, jot down any lower priority loose ends that are distracting you and throw them in your inbox (physical or digital) to address later. Then, get to work on one of your three top tasks for the day.
Devote the first 30 minutes of your day to a burst of progress on one of your highest priority projects or to the removal of specific distractions in order to improve your focus for the rest of the day.
Discard the idea that every email you get deserves some of your time. Make a quick evaluation and then either delete it, do any less than two-minute task, or add the appropriate task to your to-do list.
Be brief, if you need to answer at all. Not every email you get deserves to be answered with a correspondingly lengthy reply or, in many cases, any reply at all. Mail templates, which you can use to autoinsert frequently used responses, are huge time savers. Learn how to use them in your mail program.
Don't file; archive. Mail programs have search functions. Unless it’s a category where you regularly need to retrieve the last activity (and you don't have that status in a more trusted system), or something that would be hard to capture in a search, just throw it in one big archive folder. If you are not using a powerful web-based mail service like Gmail, you will probably want to start a fresh archive folder for each year and store the ones from prior years in backup. Keeping separate and therefore smaller archives makes it faster for programs to locate search results.
Trash is your friend! Delete anything that requires no action on your part and isn't something you need to reference soon or in the future.
Give up your role as unnecessary mail hoarder. If this email isn't the very first place you'd look for this information, don't carefully save it for future reference. Put the information where you will look (if it isn't already there).
Stop the distraction machine. Turn off all new mail alerts. No sounds, no counts, no pop-ups. Check email on your terms, as needed, and only between doing other actions.
Filter where possible. If you know that mail fitting a particular pattern belongs to a particular task—for example, email newsletters that fit within your recurring “professional reading” activity—automatically route it to a folder for that task. Then, remove its “unread mail” status on the way there, so you aren't tempted to pay it more attention than it deserves. You'll track the need to do the recurring activity of examining those folders in your to-do’s or calendar.
Finally, and most importantly: Don't use your inbox as your to-do list. It is ill suited to that purpose because it doesn't help you focus on doing. It is poor at distinguishing between things to which you want to pay attention today and things you may not need to act on for days or even weeks. You can think of your inbox as your hand, reaching out to someone who is handing you a piece of paper. Glance at the paper to see if it's urgent, but don’t stand there with hundreds of pages in your hand. Instead, put the pages where they need to be. They represent actions that you will either do now, add to your to-do list, or archive. A small percentage may need to stick around briefly—with a label, as described below—but you can delete or archive pretty much everything.
Getting more out of Gmail’s Priority Inbox
Gmail now offers a feature called Priority Inbox, which allows you to have up to four tiers in your email inbox with automatically detected (and adjustable) messages sorted into ranked sections. This tool is very