Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [32]
You need very few labels:
“active project support” (or “task support,” if you prefer a shorter term) You need these emails in order to perform tasks for a current active project. If you won’t do the task in the next 48 hours and you can easily copy the information in the email to your to-do list entry for that task, archive or file the email. If the task is coming up quickly, just apply the label and spare yourself the extra effort. Strike a good balance between the pleasure of an empty inbox and busywork copying information more than is necessary.
“waiting for” Use this label as a reminder of something you may need to nudge someone else later to resolve (for example, the receipt for an online order, which you will want to reference if the goods haven’t arrived as expected) or for something that is queued up behind another task you expect to finish shortly.
“discuss with ___” If you regularly need to consult with someone else—your boss, perhaps, or your spouse—before deciding how to handle an email, you may want to add a label so that you can easily bring up your complete list of open questions when you meet with that person.
“to read” You will probably want more than one of these (for example, “to read: business” and “to read: personal”). This label goes on anything that you can tell right away you don't need to read right now but will need to look through at some point. Catching up on these categories can be a good task when you are feeling brain dead or have only a few minutes before you go into a meeting. Periodically review your “to read” items to make sure that what once went into that bucket is still something you’d put in there today.
There can be deeper forces at work here than you might expect. We change over time, but we often experience a lag in acknowledging that change, particularly where our aspirations are involved. We hold onto expectations of what we should know and objects we thought would bring us to that state of competence. It can be curiously as difficult for us to let go of something we thought we should study as to drop a project that no longer serves our current bigger picture goals. That reluctance shows up in the language we use about managing our reading lists—biting the bullet, purging, weeding, culling—painting a picture of us killing off something alive.
As a mental exercise, consider a different metaphor next time you look at your “to read” pile: “Does this train go to the station I’m trying to reach?” Just because you don’t decide to take it, the train doesn’t vanish from the world or cease to be useful to other people. Let it go if it’s not the one you need.
Bloggers may also find it handy to have a “to post” label for email to which they want to respond publicly or which inspires a post. In general, though, the four labels above should be sufficient to cover anything worth keeping in the inbox temporarily. If you do add more labels, consider putting a distinctive character at the start of these key ones (e.g., “@waiting for” or “_waiting for”) to insure that they are always sorted to the top of the list for quick access.
Why label instead of moving to folders? It avoids the risk of “out of sight, out of mind” while allowing you to tell at a glance that you've already handled everything that currently needs handling. You get the benefit of inbox zero without wasting a lot of time or having to establish new rituals to check special folders.
For categories of which you don't want to be reminded until you're performing a round of that activity (for example, something like “to read: professional development”), folders or their equivalent are helpful. In Gmail, you can keep those pending things labeled appropriately and archived, always retrievable by selecting all messages with that label, which you remove from each one after reading it. Wherever possible I also encourage you to take advantage of any controls for showing and hiding the list of labels, which allow you to keep only your primary ones in constant view.
Remember: When processing new email, you want to