Tagged / Labelled emails

I have a lot of email. A lot...

I used to file it in discrete folders inside folders inside other folders - stored away in case I should ever need it in future (and I often do). The trouble with the folders is it can take a while to find what you're looking for. In addition you eventually end up with a huge list of folders to navigate through in order to file something away.

I am talking about my work email here but the situation was closely emulated in my personal email. One day though, I got sick of the amount of spam I was receiving and decided to pack it in start afresh. I opened a shiny new gmail account and it was at this point my eyes were opened to tagged emails (called labels in gmail).

Now I have a flat archive with great search capability and things are tagged according to what they are. Ok so I still have a huge list of tags but everything is archived in the same folder so it takes no time to sweep email in there once it's categorised. Best of all, I can find things without trawling through ten folders first.

The next task was to categorise my work email and keep it up-to-date. More on that later.

Needless to say this new method (for me anyway) is more flexible and in many ways more powerful, especially when using Outlook's Search Folders.


Thanks to gmail and 43 Folders (link) where I first read about GTD and which shaped my thinking about this topic and others.