Been thinking during this week of lower flow email that email overload is a real thing, and it is solvable, but that the approach is not "a better mail client". The answer is a better way to do the stuff you do inside email.<p>What you do inside email varies -- calendaring, task management (as PG says), catching up with friends, discussions about work stuff, funny forwards... what else?<p>What's inside your email?<p>Some background = http://a.sarva.co/2012/12/reading-paul-graham-on-the-re-invention-of-email/<p>In other words, help me figure out what my next startup should be about (me = cofounder Virgin Mobile USA, IPO and Peek, acquired).
The only moderately interesting thing I do with email (other than, er, email), is use my drafts folder as a place to save notes so that I can access them from the cloud.<p>I open a new draft email and set the subject as "Board meeting 30th December 2012". Then I jot down quick notes when I need to in bullet points.<p>I do the same when I'm interviewing someone (after letting them know that I'm listening but that it's important that I take notes about some of the technical areas we ask about). When I look inside my drafts folder I see a nice list of events that I took notes at.<p>It also works great when you wake up in the night with a new idea or blog post which you want to jot down. I can head save the draft, then pick it up on my phone on the way in to work.
Low priority tasks and mid-term storage, low-priority long-term storage.<p>The right way to get to inbox zero is to ruthlessly categorize incoming email into the right buckets for GTD or some comparable system, bumping them into Asana, Evernote, or whatever.<p>I am convinced, however, that email is currently our best default inbox. It's the most reliable place to leave something where you'll probably find it again. I think overcoming the inertia of email-is-the-default behavior is harder than actually building the apps that will help manage things better.
I'm fairly young and I'm not anywhere close to email overload, but some highlights: I have a 'server logs' label for various reports/scripts I use, an 'ideas' label I send things to myself (and reply, with each development; these are not todos but high-level efforts). But mostly I just read NYTimes alerts. My inbox used to be hell until I spent a few hours setting up several filters. I don't mind checking multiple inboxes/labels, but I don't want them overlapping.
For the younger generation, email is no such big deal anymore, they hardly use it.
Maybe we just need different channels for communication.
What if email in the future is only used for ads and newsletter kind of stuff.
The more important communication could take place on other channels for example iMessage. You can basically exchange messages and media, do we really need more?
I delete everything but emails that require a response.<p>If all the email needs is a response, I do that right away and delete the email immediately.<p>If I need to do something before replying, I keep it.<p>This pretty much leaves only the stuff I need to do in the inbox. Also never enable automatic deletion after a certain time, so it's possible to look up old emails.