Anyone who has ever used e-mail extensively understands the importance of managing e-mail. E-mail can be both a blessing and the ultimate curse. It can be a useful productivity tool or it can literally enslave you to the point where e-mail is the only thing you do. We've all been there. So then the question becomes, what is the best way to manage your e-mail?

Farhad Manjoo recently wrote an article for the New York Times attempting to address this question.

An Empty In-Box, or With Just a Few E-Mail Messages?

The article struck me because it very closely matches my own method for managing e-mail. One of the keys mentioned by Farhad is the empty or almost empty inbox:

CLEAR OUT YOUR IN-BOX Set aside an hour or two to respond to every important message that has dogged you in the last couple months (anything older than that is too ancient to bother with). Next, move everything else into a new folder called Archive — this will be your storehouse of old mail.

Your in-box should now be empty. Think of this as its optimal state — your goal, from now on, will be to keep this space as pristine as possible, either empty or nearly so. To realize that goal, live by this precept: Whenever you receive a new message, do something with it. Don’t read your e-mail and then just let it sit there — that’s a recipe for chaos.

I also view the nearly empty inbox as the ideal state. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. In my main personal e-mail account (the issue of having too many e-mail accounts, which I do, might be the subject of another article), my inbox has about 900 messages, which is a far cry from empty. However, it has stayed at around 900 for about 3 months. In other words, I've been managing new messages in a manner similar to the empty inbox, always doing something with messages so that they do not linger too long. The older messages are the real problem and I tend to those when I have the time. Since they are already old, any time constraints are long gone.

If the inbox gets too large, I might create an archive folder and move all messages to that, which would allow me to start fresh. The only problem with doing so is that in my experience, archived messages are never looked at again. So, if you're comfortable with forgetting about a bunch of mail that you may have never responded to, archiving is a good option. Six months ago, my inbox was at around 1800 messages. It was so large and unwieldy that I had to take drastic measures. Although I was tempted to archive all messages, I ended up taking a few days to really read and take action (delete, forward, reply, etc.) on hundreds of messages until the inbox was manageable again. Thus my current state of 900 or so messages.

The inbox as TODO list is a model that works well for me. Basically, every morning, I'll skim through the inbox to see if there are any actions that need to be taken. Although I also use other tools for managing todos, the inbox makes a great companion todo list.

The biggest gotcha for using e-mail is to become consumed by it. We've probably all experienced this in one form or another. Instead of setting aside time for reading/writing e-mail, you are basically doing e-mail all day long. You wake up, open your inbox and read/write e-mail for the next 6 hours. When you're done, the work day is over. Unless your job really does revolve around e-mail, doing nothing but e-mail means you're not doing anything else. Close your inbox and do something else, anything else. Try to limit your e-mail time to two hours a day. And make those two hours as productive as possible. If you have to read the same e-mail multiple times, you're not being as efficient as possible.

E-mail is an important tool and managing e-mail effectively is truly an art form. Those who manage e-mail effectively are probably better at managing other aspects of their life. If you're not sure if you are "good" at e-mail, take a step back and evaluate. Better now than to wake up for that performance review and realize that for the last quarter, your accomplishments have been limited to writing some really profound e-mails.