Alright, let's go on with a question now from Ab. Ab asks, "Which emails do you keep? Do you have a filing system?" Ab, an email inbox is not a good information or knowledge management system. People do try to keep track of the different obligations or information relevant to projects, etc.

in their inbox because they trust their inbox as a system. They know they always check. They trust it as one of the few productivity systems that they know is not going to just disappear. They'll forget what's in there. But I don't think it's a great idea to mix information management with back and forth communication.

So when you clear an email out of your inbox, the relevant information needs to go into your relevant long-term system. An inbox is a terrible system. Where that system is depends on the information. So if there's an email that's talking about an upcoming meeting, well, that's going to go on your calendar.

And then you don't need that in your inbox anymore. If an email captures some sort of task that you are going to need to get done, well, that should get transformed into, let's say, a card on your task board where you could even copy the whole text of the email and put it on the back of that virtual card.

So the information is there, but it's better for it to be on a card where the card can be under a column that captures its status, and that column can be on a board that captures the particular professional role to which that task is relevant. That's a way more informative way of storing that information than just, "Here is an email buried somewhere in my inbox that I vaguely remember that it has some information in there that might be relevant." So this is what you need to do.

Get it out of your inbox. Get it into a more trusted system that's part of a more systematic way of organizing your work. You want it, and this is the analogy I often give to people, in an age of old-fashioned interoffice memos and interoffice mail cubbies where you would go to the mail room, remember this, and there would be letters and memos in your mail slot that you would take out to bring back to your office.

You want to just keep stuff in there to organize your professional life. Like, "Yeah, I just have a bunch of stuff stacked in my mailbox cubby in the mail room at my office, and I just sort of go in there and look through it to see what's going on." You say, "No, I have my own to-do list and a day planner, and I keep track of things myself." Your email inbox is the same way.

That's not the right place to keep track of what's going on in your life.