Boring time…
Last night, I was up until around 4am, sorting through the last 15 years or so of my GMail, over 3600 emails all mixed together…
I found about 2100 of those emails were spam, reported and deleted of course. Then I spent the time to categorize the remaining valid ~1500 emails into sorted categories, mostly sorted by the site it pertains to.
It took over 4 hours…
Fun fun right? But I got it done!
I’ve done this. I think it’s a great way to empower yourself over your email.
My latest system has been that I gave up on labels/categories. I have a 2 inbox system. Anything that I expect to get that I know isn’t urgent gets a filter that archives it (skip the inbox) but leaves it unread. Then every couple days I flip through those unread emails and I can blow through them with keyboard shortcuts knowing I’m mostly just scanning and acknowledging them.
I find different categories don’t add value because clicking the labels destroys the efficiency of using simple keyboard shortcuts.