A Simple System to Reorganise Your Emails

After a Getting Things Done micro-seminar given by a friend, I took it upon myself to start learning about, and introducing, GTD into my life. I’m not an expert but a few simple changes have made a huge difference already. One of these is how I manage and organise emails.

photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal
I now know what needs action, what I’m waiting on, where reference emails are stored and I don’t keep lots of emails unnecessarily. The system helps me manage my emails. It works with email clients and webmail (so outlook, Apple’s mail, thunderbird, gmail, yahoo mail etc. you name it) and the simple structure can be used at home as well as in the office. Organized emails!

New Folder Structure:

Here are the mail subfolders I have created under my ‘inbox’ and their descriptions. Placing an @symbol in front of the folder name causes it to appear at the top of the screen, so it puts the important folders first

@ Action – emails/items/tasks that require me to do something
@ Read or Review – emails that take me more than two minutes to read
@ Someday Maybe – things I may look at in the future, not right now. For instance training courses I’m interested in.
@ Waiting – emails where I’m waiting for a third party to reply/perform an action etc before I move this email elsewhere.
Current Year – Contains organized sub-folders with each of my current projects. These project folders contain the emails I really need to keep.
Archive (at the end of each year I move the ‘current year’ folder (and it’s subfolders) into the archive and rename it 20XX). I then create a new ‘Current Year’ folder for the new year.

The Rules

Here are the rules I follow in order to process and deal with my emails on a day to day basis:

1. As soon as an email arrives: it is moved into one of the subfolders below the inbox, read or deleted. If the email is going to take more than two minutes to look at I immediately file it into @ Read or Review. No exceptions.

2. I only keep emails I think I will really, really need in the future. These emails are moved into an appropriate project folder under Current Year. This is usually after they have been in the @ Action, @ Read or Review or @ Waiting folders for a time. If I’ve had a ten-email conversation with someone I may only keep one of these messages if I really think I will need it for reference in the future. I used to keep them all. Keeping unnecessary emails clutters up the system and makes it harder for me to find the emails I really need.

3. I delete emails more than I keep them. I used to keep everything in my inbox and sporadically move emails into a project folder or an archive folder. I had so many emails in my inbox I had no idea what I needed to action and things were sometimes lost or forgotten. I kept thousands of messages in my archives that I didn’t even need.

4. I allocate myself blocks of time each day to process the @Action and @Read or Review folders and also check or chase @waiting emails.

How I implemented this system

1. I started with a clean slate: I moved all of my existing inbox emails, folders and subfolders into a folder called ‘old-system’.
2. I created the new folder structure.
3. I started processing new emails using the system immediately.
4. I sorted through my ‘old-system’ folder gradually. I allocated a block of time each day to sort through these old emails. I went through all of the old messages and folders, deciding what I really needed to keep and either moving the messages into the new system or deleting them altogether. It took some time, but I knew I was keeping on top of all my new emails.

Simple as that! This system works well for me. If you can recommend any improvements, please comment below! For non GTD’ers I would recommend you read Getting Things Done, by David Allen.