You obviously can’t take care of every email in your inbox in one sitting – not if your inbox looks like mine, anyway! So, we need a way to prioritise our mail and make sure we (a) don’t miss any emails (or see them too late) and (b) don’t lose track of the to-dos they contain.

To implement a ‘clean-mailbox policy’ that will allow you to focus on your most important tasks, we need to introduce a few folders to help you quickly and effectively sort the email that comes in. These folders are time-based, and not subject-based; subject-based categorisation quickly gets too complex to manage efficiently, especially as content categories change over time. The most effective way to sort emails is based on how soon they require your attention. I recommend four ‘action folders’:

1. Do this week. This is your to-do list. File any email that is urgent and/or important enough to be done in the short term (as in, within a week), but cannot be done in two minutes (more on the two-minute rule in a bit). This includes emails that have to be taken care of today!
2. Holding for later. This is a parking spot for emails that require your attention but are less urgent. Anything that can be done a week from now or later should be parked here for later review. When in doubt, put it here. Once a week this folder should be reviewed to determine which emails need to become to-do items.
3. Waiting for others. This folder contains emails you need to keep an eye on, but the ball is in someone else’s court. While you are waiting for an answer or resolution, the mail should wait here. Again, review this folder once a week.
4. Calendar. Technically this isn’t really a folder but a feature of your email client. It’s where any date-specific emails should be filed. You can save the entire email here so that you have all the details. If you need to block time to prepare for a meeting or complete the task, create a calendar appointment for yourself to do that.

By emptying your inbox a couple of times a day you will be on top of all the news without becoming a slave of your inbox. Once empty, you will find your new and improved task list, ‘Do This Week’, to be a good spot to work from. It is a list of emails, each one represents a task related to it and as the list does not change unless you add or remove new ones yourself, it does not distract you the way your inbox does. As you complete tasks from your ‘Do This Week’ folder you can ‘tick them off’ by moving them to ‘Filed Items’. Doing this with the keyboard shortcuts explained under ‘Start Speedmailing’ will turn you into a true speedmailer.

You can drag an email onto the Calendar button in Outlook (bottom-left) to create a new appointment which includes a copy of the text of the email in the notes field. This also works for saving the sender as a contact: just drag the email onto the Contacts button.

<aside> 💡 Pro-tip! Use this process to manage all your to-dos! Whenever you think of something you need to do, you can simply email it to yourself and process that task like the rest. Email Handyman developed a reminder app to make this process even simpler: Braintoss lets you email yourself a quick text, voice message, or photo reminder with the push of a button. David Allen named Braintoss ‘the best GTD® capture tool for the iPhone®’. His book, Getting Things Done, is the guiding principle to the Speedmailing method.

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