I get a lot of e-mail. On an average day, my inbox will see around 250 “good” messages that require some level of attention from me, as well as several thousand spams—most of which are, of course, caught by our various server- and client-side filters.

Having to deal with 250 messages every day is a pretty big problem. I don’t subscribe to the concept that one should answer all e-mail at fixed times during the day for two reasons: first, some e-mail does need to be addressed immediately. I can be coy and let people know that I’ll get around to it when I get around to it, but it’s just not my style. Second, some e-mail requires more time to be answered than the rest, and none of the e-mail strategies I’ve seen deal with that. Finally, a good strategy needs to deal with archiving messages in such a way that they can be retrieved easily when needed.

For the longest time, I took the common approach of organizing my inbox in a hierarchical folder structure organized by topic, or sometimes by person. Clearly, this approach doesn’t work for a number of reasons: mislabel an e-mail, and the chances that you’ll ever find it again are… small. Plus, it’s difficult to keep track of which e-mails still need attention.

About nine months ago, because that system was performing so poorly, I switched all my mail to Gmail in an attempt to get a grip on it. Unfortunately, I kept using Gmail as a “normal” MUA, and after six months I had had about enough of it. In the meantime, though, all the mail I was receiving was still accumulating on my main e-mail address, because instead of just setting up an alias, we had set up a forward. The resulting mess of 250,000 e-mails was not easy to clean up, and I still get the evil eye any time it comes up in staff meetings.

The Solution: Triage
After returning to a GUI-based MUA (I use Apple Mail), I was determined to find a simple but efficient mechanism that would let me handle e-mail without making too many compromises while avoiding insanity.

For the last couple of months, I have adopted a system that is borrowed from the way triage works in emergency rooms. It’s simple, and it works really well.

First of all, I now only have four folders:

• Inbox—I ignore it completely
• New—this is a “meta” folder in which all messages that are marked as unread are shown
• Flagged—these are messages that I have flagged for later examination
• Archive—these are messages that I have decided to keep and that arrived before the beginning of the current month

When a new message arrives, it automatically shows up in my “New” folder. This way, I can immediately see which e-mails I haven’t yet considered. When I look at my new mail—usually a few times an hour—I can take one of four actions:

• Reply—if a message does require some sort of reply, I try to reply to it immediately only if it either requires a very quick note or if it cannot wait until the end of the day.
• Flag—otherwise, if it requires a reply but it’s neither urgent nor can be solved quickly, I flag it for future action.
• Keep—assuming that the message is something I want to keep for the future, I do nothing; it will disappear from my “New” folder and stay in the Inbox.
• Delete—if the message is spam, or if it doesn’t require an answer and I don’t want to keep it, I just delete it.

As you can see, an e-mail that doesn’t get acted upon right away is, at best, archived and, at worst, immediately deleted. In either case, I won’t consider it again. This makes for a very significant incentive to pay attention to what I’m doing!

End-of-day and End-of-month Tasks
At the end of each day, I go through my flagged messages and triage them again, deciding which ones can be answered in the time left before I leave work (and keeping their relative importance in mind). At the end of the month, I move all messages from the Inbox into the Archive (I have further split the latter into individual folders for each month so that it never grows to gigantic proportions).

Dealing with Mailing Lists
I treat mailing lists messages like regular mail, with the exception that I never archive them; unless I want to respond, they’re history.

Does It Really Work?
Well, it works for me. On average, my “Flagged” folder has less than twenty messages at the end of any given day, and it’s never gone above 25. My day has definitely become more productive, because I don’t have to worry about keeping track of e-mails, and I haven’t had to sacrifice the level of immediateness that electronic messaging entails. As with everything else, YMMV.