Karl Voit has an interesting post on email management and the concepts of inbox zero and inbox infinity. You probably already know about inbox zero. It’s the concept that you don’t let emails pile up in your inbox. You read each email once and act on it either by deleting/archiving it, responding to it, or adding it to a TODO list. You never leave it in the inbox.
Less well known is the inbox infinity concept. The idea is that you accept that you have too many emails to handle and just don’t respond to (some of) them. That strikes me as rude and a good way to get fired. As Voit says, if you’re getting too many emails to handle, that’s a sign that something else is wrong.
Voit outlines his method of dealing with emails; it’s pretty much what I do. I stole my method from Ben Maughan’s post on how he uses mu4e. It’s basically the inbox zero method with one important addition: all email is either deleted or archived to a single folder. Decent mail clients like mu4e have powerful search facilities that make it easy to find any given email. It’s also easy to add a TODO item to my agenda and link the email to it with mu4e.
I do cheat a little by having a temporary folder for email need to keep for a short time. Emails from Amazon saying that they’ve shipped some order is an example: I save it until the order comes and then delete. I could, of course, save those to my main archive folder and add a TODO item but the temporary folder seems easier.
Voit includes a great video of a Google Talk by Merlin Mann on dealing with email and using the inbox zero method. It’s just short of an hour so you’ll have to schedule some time but it’s worth your time. In particular, he explains why a single archiving folder is superior to a complicated taxonomy of folders for saving your emails.