Organising your emails

I started working around three years ago with a startup having around 300 employees and a CEO. For around one year, I got to work with her closely as a Chief-of-Staff. While I was working with her, I learned many things. One of them was Getting Things Done (GTD) training. Keeping your emails organised was a part of that training.

Need to keep your emails organised / Why do we need to organise our emails?

1. It must have happened to you that you read one email and then missed out on acting on it. 
2. You responded to one email but forgot to work on it and hence missed doing the work.
3. You read one email multiple times because you had a doubt if you had read that email in your inbox or not.
4. You keep the emails on which you need to work as unread, and sometimes, when accidentally, you have marked it as read, you have to find that email again and keep it as unread.

If you follow these simple rules about GTD for email organising, you can save a lot of time and will be clear on what emails you have responded to and what is left.

You need to keep zero inbox (no emails in your inbox). The rule is that in your inbox, only those emails should be there on which you need to work on that day itself. Everything else is either deleted, archived, moved to a different folder, snoozed, or responded to and then archived.

The tips are:

1. Promotional emails or any spam emails that are not at all useful, delete them.
2. If there are any holidays/ calendar shared by HR, then put all those holidays on your calendar and then archive that email or move that email to a folder in which you can keep such resources. I call this folder ‘References’.
3. If there is any email that takes just 3–4 minutes of your time, do it when you open your inbox in the morning itself. For example: Scheduling a meeting or sending a reminder email to someone.
4. If you send an email to someone and you are supposed to follow-up if they don’t respond then after sending the email, go to the sent items and snooze that email for 3/4 days later — on whatever day you need to follow-up. 
5. If there is any project email that you will do 3 days later, then respond to that email and snooze it for 3 days later. Three days later, that email will automatically come back to your inbox, and you can do that work then.
6. If there is any big project that needs a lot of work to do, then take notes and respond to that email and whenever you work on it, snooze it for that day.
7. At the end of the day, when you are logging off, your inbox should be zero. If there is any action item that you can not do, then update the stakeholders if it is needed and snooze that email to the next day.

These rules have immensely helped me in being confident about my own work like what I have done on that day and what emails I have received.

I hope that these rules will also be useful to some of you. If you follow something else to keep your work organised, feel free to add it in the comments. I would be grateful to know those things.

Sharing an image of how my work and my personal email inboxes look like:

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