Now that you are processing your email instead of nesting on it, you’ll need to consider a sustainable strategy for archiving and storage of your message.  You also need to figure out how you’ll find what you need (a common source of anxiety for those of us who are unaccustomed to filing).

Philosophy:

• File everything you think you might need. 
• Don’t be concerned about hanging on to something, as long as you have a good place to put it where you can get to it if you need it.  Disk space is more abundant than ever these days, and there are plenty of free, readily-available searching and indexing tools to help with retrieval (more about that later).
• Don’t be afraid to delete things
  • I know I said you can file anything you want, but try to develop a more mercenary attitude about what you file.  Your tolerance for this, your personal document retention requirements, etc. may vary, but anything you delete is something you no longer have to take care of.
• Name your folders something meaningful
  • You won’t always remember what you called the file, but you should be able to find it in a couple of tries (for example, info about General Motors will be under Inbox/Customers/General Motors or Inbox/Customers/GM in my system.
• Decide on a naming convention when you save files to your hard drive
  • This will help you find things, and will help you purge things systematically.
    • For example, you may want to archive old, complete projects, things from a previous role in the company, and what not.
  • I have developed a habit of including the date within the name of lots of the files I create, particularly if they are things that are likely to be replaced by updated versions later on.  For example, if I receive or create a copy of a corporate presentation today, I will save the file as “2005 08 25 Corporate Presentation.ppt.”
    • This way, when I search for “corporate presentation” I can easily find the latest one.
    • This method allows me to find all files that start with “2005” so I can easily archive them to off-line storage and get them off my system when the appropriate time as passed.

Storage: setting up an archive strategy

In corporate environments, there is typically a limit to how much data you’re allowed to store on your company’s mail server.  That’s certainly true for me.

To make it easy for me to find things, I did the following (note that this is Outlook-specific, but similar concepts should apply with other email systems).

Create an archive file that is stored in My Documents

One of the issues I’ve had with Outlook is that it doesn’t put its archive files in the My Documents folder by default.  When I do system backups, I’d like to be able to back up My Documents and get as much of my user-specific data as possible, so I create an archive file that is stored within a “My Documents\Outlook Offline” folder. 

To create a new archive folder, use the File / New / Outlook Data File… command within Outlook, and navigate to a folder within your “My Documents” folder on your PC.  My current Archive folder is called “1ArchiveForGTD” but you can name it anything you want.

Next, from within Outlook, select Tools / Options, then click on the “Other” tab.  On the “Other” tab, click the AutoArchive button, and you’ll see something like the dialog below. 

As you may be able to see, I have changed my default AutoArchive settings so that my old messages are moved to this Archive file every 14 days, and I move items over 2 months old.

This creates a replica of my folder structure within the Archive folder so I can easily find items that have been archived.

So how do I find items?  I use a program called LookOut to index and search all of my mail folders, and have scheduled re-indexes daily so LookOut’s data stays current.  Similarly, you can use one of the many free desktop search products available now from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and others.

Some other things I’ve learned along the way:

• I don’t want things in my “context folders” like @Office, @computer – web, and other folders to be archived, so I excluded them from my scheduled autoarchive by right clicking on each of these folders and changed their AutoArchive setting to “Do not archive items in this folder.”
• I don’t autoarchive my tasks or contacts – you can use the same approach to exclude them from the autoarchive process.

This is a very high level overview of my process – I’ll share some other tips in the future that may help with these actions, as well.

In the last post I mentioned we'd be discussing filing and archiving strategies.  As I was working on that post, I realized I might be getting ahead of myself - before we get to archiving, let's talk about how to keep your Inbox at zero without going crazy.

Here are some tips I've adopted, adapted, and developed to reduce the effort to get my Inbox to empty:

Treat Inbox Processing as Planned Work:

When I first got my inbox to empty, it became like a game of "whack-a-mole" and I became obsessed with keeping it clear at all times.  That kept me from doing planned work, since I was so busy cleaning my inbox all the time.  If you're on that treadmill, here are a couple of tips to break the addiction:

• Schedule some uninterrupted time to get your email done each day and try to stick to it. 
  • Be aware of how many messages you typically handle in an hour, and keep an eye on how many you get each day so you don't under-schedule this block of time.  One morning, and one late afternoon block might work best - it's all up to you.

• Turn off your email alerts and "dings" so you don't get lured by email's siren song when you should be doing something else.  Emergency scanning is OK, but…

• Remember the two minute rule - and try to stick to it tightly for at least 3 weeks to see if you can develop a habit.
  • Gadget Alert: For me, using the GTD add-in for Outlook has been a big factor in being able to stick to the two-minute rule - it makes it easy for me to quickly file, delegate, and defer items that would take more than two minutes to get done.

Preventive Measures:  Heading 'em off at the pass

One of the most effective ways to reduce clutter in your email inbox is to keep messages from showing up there in the first place.  Here are some ideas:

• Use rules and tools to autofile messages
  • For example, I have a newsletter rule that moves a daily report I receive to a reference folder automatically

  • Products like ClearContext provide advanced filing aids to help you organize your email with less effort

• Unsubscribe from newsletters and alerts you receive but don't really read.
  • When in doubt, create a rule to autofile these to a Newsletter folder, perhaps with topic-specific subfolders for each newsletter.

• Switch to RSS vs. email distribution wherever you can, so you don't mingle reading material and actionable emails.
  • Use a reader than can archive things for offline perusal if you travel a lot - I swear by SharpReader.

  • If you're concerned you'll forget to go read them, either decide they weren't important after all or set up a periodic tickler to remind you.

• Use an anti-spam product.
  • I'm currently using Qurb, but have had success in the past with IHateSpam, CloudMark, and other products.

  • For corporate spam blocking, consider services from companies like FrontBridge, MessageLabs, or similar technologies that filter out spam before it even gets to your mail server.

What about you - any useful tips to share? Drop me a line or leave a comment

In Part Two of David Allen's book Getting Things Done, there is a lot of fabulous information about how to process your inbox. While I found it valuable and it worked perfectly for my stacks o' stuff, I tweaked the process a bit to deal with my email inbox.

When I started GTD about 18 months ago, I had around 8000 emails in my inbox, about 2500 of which were unread. At the time, I ran my company's IT department, which was the only way I could get away with having that much stuff in my inbox (I raised my storage quota on the mail server - not a best practice, by the way).

The "start at the top and deal with one item at a time" method was causing me to twitch, so I developed a different strategy. Here is what it looks like - if you're dealing with a big purge of email, I'm hoping some of the methods will help.

1. Consider temporarily following a "one minute rule" for handling messages (instead of the "two minute rule" from the book)

• During this process, I used the one minute rule for two reasons:
  • I had too many messages to afford myself that much time per message

  • I wasn't very good at judging two minutes, and ended up spending 5+ minutes on things I thought were going to be two minute actions

2. Sort by sender, then...

• Consider deleting:
  • Messages from people you don't know

  • Message from people who are no longer with the company

  • Newsletters you'll never read (be honest)

  • Messages from people who only send you lame jokes and hoaxes (you know who they are by now)

  • Messages from benevolent Nigerians or foreign national lotteries claiming to have money for you

3. Sort by Subject / Topic / Conversation, then...

• Delete:
  • Issues you don't care about

  • Outdated newsletters that are still there from the first pass

• Delete or file:
  • Issues that have been resolved
    • Decide whether you need to file the whole thread or just the one with the conclusion

• File things you want to retain for reference, like:
  • Interesting factoids that you want to retain for reference

  • Information for personnel files

  • Information pertinent to your job, goals, hobbies, etc.

  • Funny stuff

  • Praise and criticism (I file these under Kudos, with a subfolder for Antikudos)

  • References to useful resources

By following these methods, you should be able to quickly get rid of irrelevant messages, things you are unlikely to read, and already-processed stuff.

When you're filing, don't be shy - just throw things into a file in your email client that makes sense to you. In Outlook, you can hit ++V to quickly move the currently selected email into a file (and the dialog provides a button to create a new folder if you don't have a suitable one already). By the way, +D deletes a message -- try it out... a lot.

This process will leave you with a much shorter list of things to process, and you can then move to the more traditional "start at the top and deal with one item at a time" process outlined in the book.

Want to see the pot of gold at the end of the inbox? Click on the image at right. Got tips of your own? Please share them.

Next post, we'll deal with some ideas for setting up an email filing and archiving strategy for Outlook.

Another helpful hint:

Check out the GTD Outlook Add-In. It is now a part of my essential toolkit for helping me keep "In" empty. It includes a nice guide on GTD workflow with Outlook, and if you buy the current version you automatically get the forthcoming release that promises to add some nice new features.

There is a trial version available at the link above - why not give it a try?