Konmariing My Emails -- Nearing the End?

When I started de-cluttering my emails five years ago, I had over 10,000. Now I'm down to under 100. Some days, I even get under 50, but I just can't seem to get rid of the last few. There seem to be two types -- new emails that come in every day, and old emails that I can't bring myself to deal with out of sentimentality or some other emotional reason.

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I've thought about my email "problem" a lot, read many articles about it, and tried different ways of tackling it. At first I dealt with them in timed sessions, e.g. 25 minutes, 5 times a week. But I found that not only does that take a lot of time out of my week, the number of emails wasn't really going down, because some of them took a long time to read. And of course, new ones are always coming in. So I switched from a time-based method to a numbers-based one. For a long time, this consisted of 25 emails, 5 sessions a week.

This took so much time out of my day that it became very frustrating before long, mainly due to the "long read" emails. So I created a series of subfolders where I could store emails until I had time to work on them, including:

➸ Action -- emails that need me to do something, obviously (whether urgently or not)
➸ To Read -- emails with content I'd like to read, but there's no time pressure
➸ To Watch/Listen -- same as above but with links to video or audio content
➸ To Copy -- emails which have information I want to keep in some other format
➸ and others to store receipts, correspondence from my art collective, links I've sent myself about interesting shops, restaurants, and other places to visit, etc.

I'm still getting the emails out of my inbox, but with many of them, the action consists of filing them away for later. This made my daily sessions much shorter and more pleasant, and I felt like I was making a lot more progress. I didn't have to worry about the important emails (i.e. ones to be actioned soon) getting lost anymore.

I chose some of these categories for their functionality. Once I finish sorting the emails, I head to the Action folder first to see if there's anything I need to do that day. Then, depending on what my day is like (or my mood!) I can choose whether I want to read some short or long emails, watch a video, listen to a podcast episode, etc. I started actioning/reading three of these as part of each session to make sure they don't build up too much. (No more than three though, or the session would end up lasting all morning!)

The syphoned-off emails aren't technically finished with, I know, but I hoped it was a compromise that allowed me to process the emails without taking too much time out of my day ... though I'm aware if the emails in the subfolders build up too much, I'll need another solution.

Not actually my inbox!
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After diligently working on them for quite a few months years, I finally got down to about 100. But as I mentioned at the beginning, I had trouble reducing them past that. In an effort to minimise the time I was spending on them, I tried reducing the number of emails per session to 20, but I had to increase it again as the number of emails crept up. More recently I reduced the number of sessions per week from 5 to 4. This seems to work okay, thankfully. The number of emails isn't going up too much, but on the other hand, it isn't going down, either.

As I said at the start, I have in general two types of emails in my inbox -- new ones that come in every day, and old ones I've hesitated to deal with. As for the new ones, I've already unsubscribed to countless email lists. Many of the old emails are difficult to deal with emotionally: they're from people who I've lost touch with, requests I never fulfilled, etc. I've decided to deal with one each session, no matter how hard it might be. I'll talk about this more in another post, as this one is getting quite long already!

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What will I do next?
Once I've taken care of all the old emails, I'm going to refresh the whole system. I'm going to clear out all of the automatic sorting rules that are in place and re-do them. I'm going to carefully think about every email that comes in and decide if I really need to be getting any more from that sender or about that topic. And I'll set up new sorting rules that divert the emails straight into the subfolders so my inbox stays as clear as possible.

And perhaps I'll eventually achieve the mythical Inbox Zero. (Just kidding!)