Day 374: Are You A Hoarder Or A Deleter?

Along with a line that said, “You are clearly one of the email saving types,” Blair sent me an article, in response to an email I sent him earlier today containing the latest information on a question he’d asked me back in May.  The article in question is Hoarders vs. Deleters: What your inbox says about you  (since one requires a WSJ membership to read the article there, the internet helps by reprinting it in other publications).  The crux is that the contents of your email inbox speaks volumes about your personality.

“If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways,” says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. “Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?”

On the other hand, if you obsessively clean your inbox every 10 minutes, you may be so quick to move on that you miss opportunities and ignore nuances. Or your compulsion for order may be sapping your energy from other endeavors, such as your family.

Oh, thank you, sagely almost-Freud.  Personality traits aside, a cluttered email box deters one from Getting Things Done and is not really a great way to archive data.  If a piece of information is not intelligently searchable, it is as useful as not saving it at all, akin to throwing a pebble into a cavern full of rocks of all shapes and sizes.

My final response to Blair was, “Actually, I’m a deleter.  GMail simply allows me to Label and Archive emails that warrant follow-up and/or archival.” 

Inbox Zero is an effective concept in modern-day communication.  So, here is one step-by-step methd to eliminate Inbox clutter.

1. Use GMail.  While the Conversations feature is its most underrated, GMail allows you to “keep it all in context.  Each message is grouped with all of its replies and displayed as a conversation.”  This discourages replies to one email from filling up an entire page of your mailbox.  If you use another mailer such as Yahoo! or Hotmail, retain it as your spam-catcher and open a GMail account.  Give out this new address only to close friends and colleagues.

2. Use Labels and Stars.  As GMail permits multiple labels, label an important piece of mail with as many contextual titles as possible.  If the email warrants action, highlight it with a star and make the starred items your To Do list for the week or next 10 days.  This is a great way to avoid procrastination.

Note: An almost fail-safe system is to avoid more than one page of email.  Once spillover begins, start getting things done and delete dead email.

3. Archive Important Emails and Use Search.  Since GMail gives you 2.5GB of storage, properly label information you want to save, place a check next to that piece of email and hit the Archive button.  This keeps the email in your mailbox, but it is not displayed on the front page.  To retrieve an archived piece of mail, use the Search function or hit All Mail to find it.  If content is huge, transfer it to a personal computer and, if not private, put it on a wiki.

4. Delete With 90% Impunity.  When opening your Inbox for the day, don’t just click on the first unread message and work your way down from there.  First and foremost, look over all of the new messages, delete ones that are mass emails from your favorite organizations (of which only one or two messages a year pertain directly to you).  Then, click on any spam or unwarranted marketing and report them as spam or phishing expeditions. 

Finally, you will be left with only the messages you have to tackle in that session.  Respond as soon as you can to the ones that require a reply, label and star ones that require action and delete messages immediately if you don’t need them any more.  Be careful, however, not to flush emails in haste as they were sent to you for a reason.

5. del.icio.us For Links.  The most important bit of information in an email is usually in the form of a URI/link.  Many people hang onto emails to save these links.  Instead of creating clutter or, even worse, favoriting/bookmarking them in your browser, create a del.icio.us account to socially bookmark your links.  This is the best method of social link archival to date, and you can now access your links from any computer in the world with internet access and not just yours.

Here is my del.icio.us as an example.

6.  Proper Linking To Images For the love of email sanity, please don’t forward whole images.  Instead, send links to pictures, so that people may bookmark them for future reference.  If images are yours, consider opening a Flickr account and upload your pictures there.  Direct potential viewers to your Flickr site.

7.  Proper Forwarding When forwarding a note, joke or (if you have to) chain mail, please remove all header information between the top and the meat of the message.  Please don’t make your recipient wade through pages upon pages of junk before they arrive at the message.  My personal M.O. is to delete a note if it contains a mile of header – it’s just not worth my time (and the humor is usually inversely proportional to the length of the forward).

8.  Use GoogleTalk To Avoid Email Ping-Pong Download and install GoogleTalk to chat and swap files (including Spreadsheets) with contacts who have Google accounts.  Conveniently, these chats are saved as searchable GMail conversations for future access. 

This isn’t simple organization or netiquette.  As we spend more time online and communicate with one another via email, IM and blogs, it is important not to generate more work and bog yourself and others down with it.  Remember that email is a tool, not an overwhelming chore or a day’s work.  Again, I’m not married to Google as my only means of eCommunication; it just happens to be the most effective one available now.  If you find something better that helps you connect various aspects of your communication and collaboration, test it out and let us know.

And, no, you don’t want to see my closet or filing cabinet.