How I’m Processing the Questions on Email for Next Week

In my post yesterday on how to get your email inbox to zero, I encouraged readers to email me their questions on email and effective practices that they use. I’ll then do some posts next week answering the best questions and highlighting some of the best ideas from people.

A helpful way to illustrate my system might be to summarize how I use it to handle these email questions I receive so that I have access to them next week when I write the posts, but still have them in an organized spot in the meantime.

Here’s principle number one for me in this: I’m not keeping those emails in my inbox.

Those who read the post yesterday could probably finish this post today for me. What I did is create a new folder in with the “working folders” that I encourage people to have. The constant folders in there are “answer,” “hold,” and “read.” But you can also create temporary folders in there for support material that you need to keep on hand for a bit, or which you need to collect for a task in the coming days.

So I created a folder called “WBN Questions” in in with my other working folders. Whenever I get a question, I send a quick thanks to the person and then move the email into that folder. Next week when I write the post, I’ll go into that folder, review the questions again, pick the best ones, and write my post.

When I’m all done, I’ll delete the emails (though I never permanently empty my deleted bin, so I’ll still have them on file), and then delete this temporary support folder.

No related posts.

November 7, 2008 | Filed Under Email | 2 Comments 

Comments

2 Responses to “How I’m Processing the Questions on Email for Next Week”

  1. Eric Schumacher on November 8th, 2008 5:25 pm

    Matt –

    If one is using Gmail, you would not want to delete messages, right? Since Gmail automatically deletes after 30 days.

    Wouldn’t “archive” be better?

  2. Matt on November 10th, 2008 7:17 am

    Eric: Yes, in Gmail you would want to archive rather than delete. Archive will give you the same benefits of deleting (out of your inbox) while keeping your messages around in the archive.

    I had another question on this, as well, so I’ve updated the original article with this:

    Update: Also, a reader pointed out below that if you use Gmail, it’s simple to use “Archive” right away instead of “Delete.” The keyboard shortcut for this is “e.” Make sure to archive rather than delete because Gmail is set to automatically delete forever emails that are in the trash for longer than 30 days. But the message in the trash (at least when it’s empty) is great: “Who needs to delete when you have over 2,000 MB of storage?” Exactly. Just make sure that you don’t leave those messages in your inbox. An inbox is for unprocessed stuff. Delete them in the sense of archiving them as soon as they are processed. (This makes them show up in “All Mail” but not your inbox.)

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