Dwayne Melancon at Genuine Curiosity has posted a good advice on processing your email – how to tackle your emails when they are swarming your inbox. He mentioned three steps: Consider a temporary invocation of the “one minute rule”; Sort by sender; Sort by Subject / Topic / Conversation, then delete or file:
When I started GTD about 18 months ago, I had around 8000 emails in my inbox, about 2500 of which were unread. At the time, I ran my company’s IT department, which was the only way I could get away with having that much stuff in my inbox (I raised my storage quota on the mail server – not a best practice, by the way).
The “start at the top and deal with one item at a time” method was causing me to twitch, so I developed a different strategy. Here is what it looks like – if you’re dealing with a big purge of email, I’m hoping some of the methods will help.
This method will be very useful after you have filtered out all of the possible spams and non-urgent emails (such as mailing list, newsletter, misc. memos). When you have keep your Inbox emptied as often as possible (that means file it or delete it), you will find you may not need as much time going through your emails anymore.
Getting your Inbox to Empty: Dealing with the first email purge – [Genuine Curiosity]
Also check out some of the good posts from the past here:
Six setup to save time in email
Essential list of links on tips and info regarding Email
[...] I just started to read the Virtual Handshake, and have been poking around the book’s website. One posting that caught my attention was on reasons why the author might miss emails. I can really relate to it, although I still feel guilty when I miss messages. Hopefully the book will have some solutions. I’ve tried to review my emails once a week, but it has not been a very successful strategy. Here are some steps to keep your inbox under control (via lifehack.org). [...]