At my current day job, email takes fair bit of my time. That’s why I find every opportunity to optimize my email workflow. I have been using @Reply, @Wait, and @Read folders for actionable emails and those can save me countless hours on searching those action required emails.
I have been testing my workflow a bit recently – mainly on moving emails that require replying to @Reply folder.
Now once I found any email that needs to reply:
- Press reply immediately
- Within 1 or 2 minutes, I will write down any thoughts I have
- If I can finish replying within 2 minutes, I will send it out immediately.
- If not, I will save it into my draft folder.
- Finally, I assign a time to reply all those pending emails that require a chunk of time.
The biggest advantage that I see from this workflow is that I will not need two folders for email-needs-reply anymore. Second, all those thoughts that I got when reading the emails will be preserved and written down.
Any suggestions or comments on this?