I was browsing my email today and a thought occurred to me; some of these emails are OLD. And being old, they are starting to clog up my inbox.

My email inbox is starting to suffer from the “Gosh I don’t have time to really read this, I’ll scan it and get back to it later” syndrome.

This got my random connection brain to start thinking about the relationships with fresh produce and email. For example, that jug of milk in your refrigerator is only good for so many days, why can’t email be the same way?  Unless you do something to the milk (drink it, use it to make something else, or freeze it) it eventually will just spoil. So, at some point if the milk sits in the fridge for too long, you need to throw it away.  Pretty simple.  Not as simple for email.

I have always had problems with an ever expanding inbox.  So, I have decided that I’m going to try and be more proactive and not have too many moldy emails sitting around.

Step 1:  When something I want to keep, or do something with comes into my email inbox, I will respond to it and move the original to another folder, or just move the email to another folder for long term storage or future reference.

Step 2: I went into Outlook and set up the Auto Archive feature (really neat thing that Auto Archive is) to run every 7 days and move any old email to the Archive folder.

Step 3: Any email I have moved to look at later, I will have to look at later.  At that point, I may delete it, or mark it as a keeper.

So, if I look at email and don’t do anything with it; in 7 days it will be out of my inbox one way or another. I won’t lose it, it will still be in my Archive folder, but it will be out of sight.

I should ad another step…

Step 4: Once a month, review the archive folder and if there isn’t anything of value in it, delete it. If there is value in an email, move it to long term storage.

I’m not sure how well this is going to work, but it might start keeping my ‘computer mind’ less cluttered and more Agile.

I’d love to hear how any of you may deal with this…