Quick Question

[bertine]

How many emails do you have in your email inbox RIGHT NOW?

I have 21 in my work inbox and 17 in my personal inbox.


I just don't get people that sit with thousands of emails in their inbox. How do you remember what you need to do?

Comments

[annablume.livejournal.com]

I get between 120 and 200 emails per day at work. I have at least 500 in there now. I can't keep track of them.

[bertine.livejournal.com]

That is a lot of emails. I get about 50 a day (that are non-system emails). I am a big believer in the inbox as a to-do list so when I read an email if there is action to do on it, I do it when I read it and get rid of it. I also only read email between tasks so I am not constantly checking it.

[annablume.livejournal.com]

It's a horrible amount of e-mails. It's really a time suck. A lot of stuff that I get is ambiguous information I may or may not need to have at my figertips at some non-specified point in the future. I really need a better way of organizing.

That said, I keep a completely separate to do list for everything that can't be done in five minutes or less. That's how I prioritize my time.

[jwright-71673.livejournal.com]

61 in Outlook and 109 in Gmail.

[bertine.livejournal.com]

Nice!

[jwright-71673.livejournal.com]

A lot of my personal e-mails are stuff that I should really do something else with. Like if someone sends a mailing address, or if I get a receipt from an on-line transaction, etc I tend to just leave 'em there.

[sithlet.livejournal.com]

My work mailbox is and always will be atrocious. I try to mitigate what I can with mail rules, but there are some things that just have to go into the main inbox or I'll never see them. I occasionally reach inbox:0 with a shitton of effort.

[bertine.livejournal.com]

I never reach inbox:0. However, I am usually pretty good at putting things in tasks in our ticket tracking system so I don't have to keep all those emails in my main inbox.

[eyelid.livejournal.com]

I am actually trying to address my ridiculous work inbox now. At the beginning of the week I had 800+ emails in there. Each day I've been cutting it down; I'm now at 250. I hope to get it to around 100 today, but I may hit a wall because I tend to save many emails to guide my billing. I also have folders they are categorized into so they're not really DELETED, which may be cheating, but I often need to refer to them later.

[bertine.livejournal.com]

Oh, I only delete emails that are system generated and aren't at all important and I keep those for a week. However, they never hit my inbox.

Sometimes my work inbox grows to the 150 emails size and that is what when I take an evening and just address stuff. It usually happens when I am really busy or had too many headaches.

Your system seems to work. I just don't get the people that never move an email to another folder or delete them. Yesterday I noticed that one of my coworkers has 24,000 emails in her inbox.

[pork_chop]

34 at work, 248 in personal

clearly my personal life is in shambles because work gets in the way.

[sterlingphoenix.livejournal.com]

Personal has 30 right now, which is WAY high. in fact, let me go clean that up a bit.

Ok, personal has 5. None are unread.

Work has 156, which is LOW, but that's because I was paged at like 4am and cleaned it out.

[phoenixredux.livejournal.com]

I have 1632 unread emails in my in-box. That's for all of my email addresses combined. I can sort that into categories. And of those, probably the most recent 2 or 3 are actually important. I stay on top of it pretty well, but I also don't bother to delete things like my "Papa John's Pizza Offer!" or NYT Headlines or Word of the Day emails or what have you. At the present time, there is a total of 5073 emails in my inbox. But it's gmail, so searching it is pretty simple.

[scorpi084.livejournal.com]

I have 3. I archive anything that isn't a to-do or a reminder of things I'll need to do soon.

[melissa-maples.livejournal.com]

Zero. I can't stand having anything in there. Either an item needs action, in which case I just do it when the e-mail comes in, or it needs filing, so I just file it.

I find it annoying that we have this wonder of instantaneous connection, and some people still don't bother to answer e-mails for weeks and weeks. And sometimes these are things that require a timely response.

[remembering.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a GTD-er :)

[melissa-maples.livejournal.com]

Nah, I don't really go for those one-size-attempts-to-fit-all-and-fails-miserably-but-sells-a-lot-of-products things. I have my own personal system that I was using long before David Allen was hawking his wares. :-)

[sacramentalist.livejournal.com]

If it's important, they'll email again :)

[jonthedull.livejournal.com]

I use gmail, I have 11,920 emails. I don't delete anything except real junk. I sometimes get large work related attachments from one person, so every so often, like once a year I search that person name and delete most of the stuff. My work email is also a gmail and I get perhaps 4 emails a week at that address.

My job is simple enough that I can remember most of what I need to do, or I tape notes to the side of my monitor.

[messyjessy.livejournal.com]

I have 79 personal and 225 at work. I'm pretty good about going through and emptying my personal inbox at least monthly. Things like LJ & Facebook comment emails pile up. But I haven't figured out a system for handling my work inbox yet.

I think you've inspired me to figure something out today.

[bubblemonkey.livejournal.com]

The email program we use (lotus notes--yuck) doesn't give us a count on emails, only how much space we're using. I also use the inbox as a to-do list, but I never ever delete. I archive to free up space because someone will always want me to reference an old email after I just deleted it. Happens all the time. I bet I have about 100 in the inbox, and the archive? Who knows. Well over 1,000 I bet.

[remembering.livejournal.com]

I have 8 emails in my work inbox and that is more than I'd like in there. I don't like having things piling up in there. The moment I have to scroll to see all my emails is when I know I have to do something about the pile up.

My personal email however gets so much crap that isn't important that I generally don't keep up with it. I'm sure it's over 200. I weed it out every once in a while, but I'm not too concerned with it- just the work account.

[bella-phenomena.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how many I have in my work email. I think it's probably between 300-500. I will normally keep anything that I need to go back to marked as "unread" even if I've read it to go back to it later. They will slowly get sorted by attachment (then by attachment type) and by who it's received from and topic (depending on importance). After it's been in there about a month, I dump everything into another folder.

Oddly enough, having a new empty inbox makes me feel off balance, since I've been doing this for so long.

[ctakahara.livejournal.com]

1 in my inbox (party planning!), 4 in my work inbox, none of them unread and all acted on - just waiting on replies.

I just got the weirdest sense of deja vu. Did you ask this question before?

[magicmarmot.livejournal.com]

None in either. I tend to clean out the inbox daily. I also clean out my cell phone message and call history.

[sharya.livejournal.com]

At home things have gotten completely out of control and I have 3800.

At work I keep it well controlled, and I'm doing well if I have less than 75 in my inbox at any one time. And at work, yes, my inbox is my to-do list.

[misanthropoet.livejournal.com]

Thousands. More than 1500 unread in my work inbox, but I get more than 300 a day. That's a big todo list. And I have to keep everything for when my boss asks me to forward the email back to him. So yeah, thousands. It's very stressful.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

zero.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

oh wait I meant unread emails. Read emails, uncountable.