Nathan’s favorite e-mail tip…

posted by Nathan Zeldes on February 19, 2007

There is a tradition that articles about email overload should end with a list of coping tips. In fact, when Fast Company wrote about my activity six years ago they concluded the article with a sidebar titled “The 10 Commandments of Email According to Intel”, which other people subsequently republished … but in truth, though I subscribe to all of them, we never used them here as a formal list of “commandments”!

I do, however, have one favorite tip, the second of the ten, which is my own invention, and I will gladly share it with you.

The tip reads:

Set up a “Five Weeks Folder” that deletes its content automatically after five weeks. Use it as a repository for messages you’re unsure about, such as that email you want to delete, but you’re not sure if the guy’s going to call you tomorrow and ask about it.

I believe I got the idea from an old pre-email story about some public service official who was said to place all his incoming mail into his top desk drawer; a week later he’d move it to the second drawer, pushing that drawer’s content into the third, and so on; any mail in the bottom drawer would be moved out of this “hardware stack” into the trashcan (a.k.a. “The round filing cabinet”). The notion was that “if it were important, the sender would’ve called me about it by the time it reached the floor”.

The electronic implementation uses one drawer, that folder I actually named Five weeks. This interval was picked so that any monthly recurrent items would not disappear before the next one came in. And it works like a charm in speeding up Inbox processing, because my principle is “If I hesitate more than 2 seconds whether or not to delete a message, into Five Weeks it goes”. No more nagging doubt, no more remorse, no more procrastination… after all, I’ll have five weeks to pull it back out should the need arise (and it seldom does).

Try it, it may do you good!

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tagged: email, infoglut, infomania, information overload