Yesterday’s post was about the sometimes frustratingly elusive empty email Inbox. To summarize, one way to keep the emails flowing out of your Inbox almost as quickly as they flow in, develop the habit of quick action decisions: delete it, take immediate action, archive it, defer it for later, or generate an action from it. Let’s do a quick run down by action.

Delete the email
Be bold! Be strong! Be courageous clicking that delete button!

Take immediate action
General rule of thumb, if you can respond and be done with it in 2 minutes or less, just do it. Then that email gets to be deleted or moved to the Pending folder (for more about this folder, read on).

Archive the email
First point on saving emails for future reference: if you can’t easily find it, it does no good to save it. Your email folder system is just as important as your (computer) desktop filing system and your hard copy filing cabinet system.

The simplest set up of your email folders is to mimic your desktop file system which mimics your filing cabinet system which is organized by… you guessed it, Roles! (This concept deserves many words in its own right, which will be forthcoming in another post.) If your email folder system is already set up then moving your inbox emails to them is intuitive and quick. If it isn’t set up, keep an eye open for new posts to the Roles series published on this site periodically.

Defer email for later
In addition to the Roles folders, there are several email folders that supplement “filing by Roles” and this is what I will write about here.

I use Entourage, which is basically the Mac version of Microsoft’s Outlook. Folders that are already set up in the program include: Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Sent Items, Deleted items, Junk Email, and maybe a couple of others. The first ones to add are:

• Pending
• Take Action
• Ready to send

Use Pending (your action is done and you are waiting for an action from someone else to conclude the communication) and Take Action (remember to set weekly time to actually take action on the items placed in here!) to defer emails for later.

Generate an action from email
Incorporate action/project to be done into your weekly planning system.