I used to have a great boss, many years ago, who had consistently around 15000 unread emails in his inbox. His approach was too scary for me to ever adopt, but I must admit it had a certain coolness factor. If you want to give it a shot, do it at your own risk.
Here’s the algorithm:
- Filter all your management chain emails (all emails from your manager, their manager, and up to the CEO) into a separate folder we’ll call “Important”.
- Filter all your reports emails (if you have any), and their reports, and so on, in that “Important” folder.
- Filter all emails from HR , Legal, and a small group of other entities, and put them there too.
- Anything else, treat as a twitter feed: whenever you have some time, scroll down and “do email”, most recent first. Whenever time’s up or you have something better or more important to do, stop.
- Any email older than three months that is unprocessed can be safely deleted. Have an automated rule for that.
The idea, he said, is that if something is actually important to someone outside of his team (or HR, Legal, etc), they will try again or find a different channel.
This approach seemed to work well for him. I’d probably get fired if I tried (or maybe that’s my self limiting belief), but I have my own method I’ll talk about another time.