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This is enough

We often talk about fold­ers, my clients and I. What is a good fold­er struc­ture to have in the email inbox? Should you have one at all? If you should have one, how many fold­ers should there be and what should they represent?

My view can be summed up as fol­lows: have as few fold­ers as pos­si­ble, but enough.

At least one

I def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend hav­ing at least one fold­er, such as an Archive fold­er, so that you can save any emails you need to keep after you have processed them some­where oth­er than direct­ly in the inbox. If you leave processed emails in your inbox, you risk see­ing emails you do not need to see at that moment when you are look­ing for emails you would like to find, which can make you think about oth­er dis­tract­ing things unnecessarily.

Instead, store emails some­where oth­er than the inbox, so that the inbox only con­tains emails that have not yet been dealt with, just as your phys­i­cal mail­box only con­tains unread morn­ing papers. (Now, if you get the impulse to email me and tell me that you are not dis­tract­ed at all by the old emails left in the inbox — try putting them away first. Per­haps you have for­got­ten what it felt like to work in a dif­fer­ent way than you do today?)

Seek, and you shall find

For myself, I get by just fine with a sin­gle Archive fold­er, as I am com­fort­able using the excel­lent search func­tions in emails (here is how to refine how you search in Out­look, for exam­ple). But, of course, you can have more fold­ers if you need to. You can have fold­ers for your var­i­ous projects, for the respon­si­bil­i­ties you have, for var­i­ous peo­ple you email often, or for any­thing else that is rel­e­vant to you.

Broad rather than narrow

If you nar­row­ly define what fold­ers should con­tain, they tend to grow in num­bers quick­ly and you end up with a long line of fold­ers to browse through when you need to save and find what you are look­ing for, which becomes cum­ber­some. It also increas­es the risk that an email con­tains infor­ma­tion that belongs in two dif­fer­ent fold­ers and you do not know where to put it, which ends up leav­ing it in your inbox ​“for now” (and for so long that you end up not dar­ing to move it, because you have for­got­ten why you left it there in the first place). There­fore, define what you keep in which fold­ers in broad terms rather than narrow.

If you do not have enough fold­ers, which will result in you often hav­ing to search for the same word or term to see the emails you are inter­est­ed in, you would find them faster if they were sim­ply col­lect­ed in a fold­er rep­re­sent­ing that cat­e­go­ry (mean­ing that project, work­group, event, or the likes).

Cre­ate a struc­ture that suits you

You see — again, I do not want to assert a truth we should all sub­scribe to, but rather high­light the pos­si­ble con­se­quences so you can find the struc­ture and method that suits you best.

So, have as few fold­ers as pos­si­ble in your email but enough so that you can quick­ly find what you are look­ing for.

Do this

Does hav­ing too many or too few fold­ers in your email sound famil­iar? If so, ask yourself:

• If you were to have as few fold­ers as pos­si­ble, but still some, how many would you need and what would they represent?
• Could you merge some fold­ers if you cur­rent­ly have more than necessary?
• If you cur­rent­ly have every­thing in your inbox, how about try­ing a dif­fer­ent stor­age loca­tion — if only for a few days? If you make a ​“Tri­al Archive” fold­er and put all your old stuff in it for the rest of the week, you can move it all back lat­er if you are not com­fort­able with hav­ing it that way.

More order means more peace

If you opti­mize how you save emails you need to keep, emails become less of a has­sle. You will still be able to find what you need quick­ly, but you will not have the feel­ing of dai­ly puls­ing around in meter-high drifts of emails as often. If you save emails some­where oth­er than direct­ly in your inbox, you will expe­ri­ence (at least more often than not) the com­fort­ing peace that comes from mas­ter­ing the emails instead of them mas­ter­ing you.

How do you do it?

Do you have a fold­er struc­ture in your email client that you real­ly like? Please write to me and share! 

(Speak­ing of inbox struc­ture. Feel free to also read my tips on how to resolve the unsolved emails hang­ing over you.)