one touch email handling

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Each day I receive hundreds of real emails (plus tons of spam which is filtered by gmail etc), and I probably send over 100 emails. Yet my inbox is almost always about 10 messages or less, which means I'm pretty responsive. Folks ask me how I do this, so I'm going to tell you my secret. (No, it does not involve cloning.)

I once read about a woman who was a professional organizer. She would come to your house and you would tell her your daily routine, where in your kitchen you ate breakfast, what you would eat, etc. The article claimed she could save you enormous amount of time just be reorganizing things, moving drawers around so things you use a lot are close, and things you use less often are in the drawers which are harder to get to. (Relates to a new cool trend with refrigerators, where they put the freezer on the bottom, for the same reason. But cf #3-4 from nutrition.)

Well, this woman described the "one touch" method for dealing with (paper) mail. She said that when you first picked up the mail (ideally from a mailbox that does not require you to bend down as that takes too long), you need to have a trash bucket nearby, and you need to immediately sort your papermail into one of three categories:

1. Trash. (Btw, it is so annoying that the USPS, a government service paid for by our taxes, makes it impossible to get off their damn junk mail lists, since they are largely funded by third class mailers.)
2. Stuff to pay, put in a bills pile.
3. Stuff to file or forward.

The woman said that if you touched your mail twice, once to move from the mailbox to the counter, and another time to pick it up off the counter to sort, that you would be doing more work and things would likely take longer to filter, thus having late bills etc.

Well, my email queue management is very similar to her method for paper mail handing...

One Touch Email Handling

When you get an email, scan it and immediately do one of the following:

1. Delete it.
2. Reply to it.
3. Forward it if appropriate, to as few people as possible, ideally to only one person if you are delegating. (If you send it to more than one person, each one will wonder if they are supposed to do something with it or not.) If you do forward something as an FYI to read, please take the time to put in an intro sentence saying why you think this is interesting.
4. File it, although note that 99% of stuff in folders never gets used, so file sparingly. (Why don't we all have a full text index and archive of every email we have ever sent or received, so we don't have to file? Aren't disks free and infinite capacity yet? Haven't programmers noticed that this is possible yet? Update 2005: gmail.)
5. Worst case, hold on to it for later action. But try as hard as you can to keep only 10 messages in your inbox! If you ever get more than 10, prune it to do one of the above on each message if possible!

If you've been away from your email for a while and/or have a large queue: read all your mail doing only deleting and filing before sending anything. It was always amazing to me how many "urgent" questions got answered by someone else before I got to the end of my inbox. (This tip from karl.)

In 2002-2003 I led the design and development of SpamSubtract software which now ships with HP/Compaq computers and is sold at retail. I'm now designing third generation anti-spam software, and I'm back to using both Eudora (for work) and Google Gmail (for personal email).