Mail management with the trusted trio

I have to admit that the multitude of emails I get from work, friends, pro bono and charity work were getting to the point of near unmanageability for me. It was causing a lot of stress. Rather embarrassingly, two important mails slid by me the other week because I had been depending way too much on Apple Mail’s ability to have everything in one Inbox and just search it via Spotlight and flagging, marking as unread and auto filtering rules to try and manage things.

Gina Trapani had an awesome article on Lifehacker about using the Trusted Trio in completely emptying your Inbox - an Action, Hold, and Archive box and that’s it. I decided to try it with my work mail and I have to admit that after a full week I feel definitely calm, cool and collected about the mail overload I was experiencing. It’s been really successful and work and makes me feel like I’m much more on top of things.

This also matched with the Getting Things Done approach to going through mails - Do, Delegate, Defer really seems to be working for me.

A little curious as to how this will extend well when I start lumping everything from the different “realms” of mail I have to deal with in the same system (ie. mixing work, personal and pro bono work), but I’ll try that next week after continuing on with this system for just work mail for a bit.