Cooked On Education

Have you ever heard one of nightmare stories about someone who has been living in a house full of trash and stuff stacked up to the ceiling? Well, this is me when it comes to email. I never delete emails. Never. I have several email accounts. I have one account that I use when I have to sign up for anything online. I use Gmail for actual correspondence. Currently, Gmail gives you around 6 gigs of storage, so why would I want or need to delete anything? Maybe what I need is to better organize it so that I can make some sense of it all.

So I have been home from work for the last week, helping my wife take care of our new baby. I have decided to take the opportunity while I am away from teaching to try and get my stuff better organized (of course this is in between diaper changing, getting up for those late night feedings, and also helping to take care of our three-year-old daughter).

I decide that my Gmail account would be a good place to start. This is what my inbox looked like before I started:

After doing some looking around for some ideas online, I discovered a site called 43 Folders. From the site’s about page:

This is 43 Folders, Merlin Mann’s family of websites about stuff like personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better.

I remembered hearing about the site when Merlin Mann was on TWIT a few weeks back. One of the main features on 43 Folders is a series of posts talking about what Mann calls “Inbox Zero” a “series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way.” According to Mann:

Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.

(43 Folders also talks about how to implement the ideas found in David Allen’s popular productivity book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, a book that I just picked up and will be writing about as I read more of it.)

Reading through the site, I picked up some ideas and spent about thirty minutes organizing and cleaning up my inbox. I used labels and filters and the archive features built into Gmail and now this is what my inbox looks like:

Maybe this is all stuff that you have been doing all along, but to me it is cool and somewhat miraculous. I set up about 15 different labels based on the different groups of people the emails were coming from, and used filters to automatically apply these labels to the messages as they come in. When I am done reading a message, I hit the archive button, and it moves the message out of my inbox and into the “All Mail” folder. Again, I am sure this is nothing revolutionary for most of you, but remember, I never throw emails away! I am taking baby steps with this. I think the next step will be to develop some type of system to take the emails and “turn them into actionable items.” What do you think? How do you organize your emails? Do you delete them right away? Or, like me do you “collect” them?