Handling an overflowing eMail inbox

When I read my email for the day, I often follow these steps: 1) browse through it quickly, deleting anything uninteresting and saving for later anything that requires some time to respond to. 2) Read anything interesting, or that has a pointer to an interesting article worth reading. 3) Get tired, go do something else, or go to bed.

Unfortunately the most important actions - responding to email that needs a response, especially from family or friends, was getting shoved to the bottom of the list of actions. In fact it was too often falling off the bottom of that list. In reality it should be the first thing I do. If other things get left undone with the email when I run out of time, such as reading interesting articles, well then so be it. The important thing is to make sure the important things get done.

So now I have a confession to make. I have a hard time resisting subscribing to a large assortment of email lists. So much potentially useful information, all sent to your inbox for free. I have a hard time resisting the thought that I might miss something worthwhile if I don't subscribe. Of course I often can't get through everything that comes into my inbox each day, so I put it off to tomorrow. You can guess where that leads. My inbox just topped 3000 messages, sigh. Time for some drastic action.

Here's what I did. I copied my entire inbox to a new folder, which I intend to slowly work my way through in the coming weeks. In the mean time, I have a fresh new clean inbox to work with. The goal is to keep the size of my new inbox down to about 1/2 page by the time I go to bed each night. So far, I've been successful for the first few days. It requires deleting a bunch of potentially interesting articles at times, but I'm putting priority at responding to messages that need a response first.

I haven't gotten around to unsubscribing to any of the email list though... I just don't want to missing something potentially important on any of them. I'm too much of an information junkie to make some needed changes here.

If you have any thoughts, or pointers to how to handle email, especially dealing with an overflowing email inbox, I'd love to hear about them. I think this is becoming one of the great new challenges of our times.