Lose the Shells: Organizing Your Inbox…or Not

By John Heaney on October 12, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Featured, Organization, Workplace

Organizing your Email is probably something that you’ve been meaning to do or have already done but are behind on. You know what we mean…all those emails piled up with about 17 different folders they could be filed under. Or that long inbox that dates back five years.

But here a radical idea: suppose you didn’t organize you emails. Suppose you didn’t even save them. That’s the theory espoused by Merlin Mann at 43folders.com. The idea is simple: once you’re done with an email, there’s no need to actually save it. Just throw it away. Or throw it away in an ‘archive’ box that doesn’t require organizing. It’s just gone:

Once you eat the peanut, the job of the shell is done. So lose it. Ditto dead email. Never organize what you can simply discard; and if you can’t discard it, throw it onto one big pile.

You can read the full post here: Link

Of course, we’d love to hear more from you about dealing with email. Any problems? Solutions?  Success stories?  Comment below, please!