Do You Have a Filing System for Your Email?

00:00:04.000 | Alright, let's go on with a question now from Ab.

00:00:09.000 | Ab asks, "Which emails do you keep? Do you have a filing system?"

00:00:16.000 | Ab, an email inbox is not a good information or knowledge management system.

00:00:22.000 | People do try to keep track of the different obligations or information relevant to projects, etc. in their inbox

00:00:33.000 | because they trust their inbox as a system. They know they always check.

00:00:36.000 | They trust it as one of the few productivity systems that they know is not going to just disappear.

00:00:40.000 | They'll forget what's in there.

00:00:42.000 | But I don't think it's a great idea to mix information management with back and forth communication.

00:00:48.000 | So when you clear an email out of your inbox, the relevant information needs to go into your relevant long-term system.

00:00:57.000 | An inbox is a terrible system.

00:00:59.000 | Where that system is depends on the information.

00:01:02.000 | So if there's an email that's talking about an upcoming meeting, well, that's going to go on your calendar.

00:01:07.000 | And then you don't need that in your inbox anymore.

00:01:09.000 | If an email captures some sort of task that you are going to need to get done,

00:01:13.000 | well, that should get transformed into, let's say, a card on your task board

00:01:17.000 | where you could even copy the whole text of the email and put it on the back of that virtual card.

00:01:21.000 | So the information is there, but it's better for it to be on a card

00:01:24.000 | where the card can be under a column that captures its status,

00:01:27.000 | and that column can be on a board that captures the particular professional role to which that task is relevant.

00:01:33.000 | That's a way more informative way of storing that information than just,

00:01:37.000 | "Here is an email buried somewhere in my inbox that I vaguely remember that it has some information in there that might be relevant."

00:01:45.000 | So this is what you need to do.

00:01:47.000 | Get it out of your inbox.

00:01:49.000 | Get it into a more trusted system that's part of a more systematic way of organizing your work.

00:01:53.000 | You want it, and this is the analogy I often give to people,

00:01:57.000 | in an age of old-fashioned interoffice memos and interoffice mail cubbies

00:02:02.000 | where you would go to the mail room, remember this,

00:02:05.000 | and there would be letters and memos in your mail slot that you would take out to bring back to your office.

00:02:10.000 | You want to just keep stuff in there to organize your professional life.

00:02:15.000 | Like, "Yeah, I just have a bunch of stuff stacked in my mailbox cubby in the mail room at my office,

00:02:20.000 | and I just sort of go in there and look through it to see what's going on."

00:02:23.000 | You say, "No, I have my own to-do list and a day planner, and I keep track of things myself."

00:02:27.000 | Your email inbox is the same way.

00:02:29.000 | That's not the right place to keep track of what's going on in your life.