My Year of Living in my Inbox

A few years ago I tried an experiment. I tried not filing my e-mails and having everything stay in my inbox. My test was inspired by something my brother in law said to me once. At the time we were chatting about how we keep our e-mails, and he said that for the first few years he had a professional e-mail he kept everything in his inbox. His thing was “I didn’t even realize I had a filing system, so I just kept everything in one place. made it so easy to find things.”
Once my eye stopped twitching I had a hard think about what he said. There is (unbelievably) some level of merit to his argument. Most e-mail clients have a reasonably powerful search engine if you are looking for something specific. all you have to do is type in a person’s name or a subject matter, and you can (usually) find what you’re looking for.

That being the case I decided to give it a whirl myself and stopped filing any of the e-mails that came into my inbox. I’ll admit, as a professional organizer with a slight tendency towards being OCD, seeing those emails pile up more and more was hard to do. At least at first. I will admit, after a while, I started to see the logic in his point. At the time I was dealing with a long term project and having all the e-mails from that project right there where I could see them was, to a degree, beneficial. It took me a while to figure out  how to work around the massive piles of e-mails, but it did get to the point where I could make the system work.

I’ll admit, I found it extremely beneficial in the short term to be able to access all my e-mails in one spot. Depending on what I was looking for I would be able to look up things by subject matter or by person. It was great. One of the things that I talk about is how I have “a swiss cheese memory” meaning that I find that I forget things on occasion. What was great about having all my e-mails there is that is someone asked me about an e-mail they sent me I would be able to sort the e-mails by sender and find any e-mails that were sent to me by that person.

The other thing that I liked about keeping all my e-mails in one place is that I could follow different subjects. I would be able to bring up e-mail chains with relative ease. This was quite helpful to me because I was (at the time) involved with a couple of exciting but long term projects which meant that I would have to follow long e-mail conversations. It was much easier because as opposed to having to dig through my files I would be able to call up the string name and be able to have all of them right there in front of me.

Like I said, this was a system that worked well, for a while. In the short term it worked well, then after a few months it worked ok, then after a while, it didn’t work at all. after about ten months it was getting to the point that I couldn’t find anything. When projects ended, and I moved onto other things those e-mails would still be in my inbox.  Conversations that I’d previously had with people and requests that had had long since been fulfilled were still sitting in my inbox. It was getting worse.

All in all I think that giving it a good try was worth the effort, but in the end, keeping all my e-mail in one spot was a terrible Idea. Once I discovered this, the trick was getting out of the mess that I had gotten myself into. This was going to take work, time, and more effort than I’m willing to comment on. At least, in this post. Stay tuned for the next post where I’m going to talk about my plan for getting out from under the pile of e-mails that I was on top of me. I’ll give you some tips that will help you if you’re ever in that situation and some final thoughts on what to do if you’re ever in a position where you feel like you have too much e-mail.

Do you keep all your e-mail in your inbox?

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