Things Learned
In my opinion:
Never start a year or job with high-level labels on your mail folders. Start with some serious detail, then start collapsing them into big folders all together once you understand what actual topics are going to matter after a month or two.
I think one of the reasons people can’t maintain an “Inbox Zero” philosophy is that their organization system for e-mails is too complex.
Mail filing is like having to act like your own little database system. And, like a good database, efficiency boils down to things like indexing and sorting. But efficiency has to be measured at least two ways, insert cost and search cost.
Insert cost is what I’m talking about. When you make a labyrinthine folder structure for e-mail saving, you’re increasing your insert cost to theoretically/hopefully decrease your search cost in the future.
While this is all pretty complicated to measure in practice, you can basically say that if you do a lot of searching you should probably make your inserting costly, and if you don’t do a lot of searching you should slack off on the indexing.
How many e-mails do you actually need to look back and find? How hard is it to identify them when you do need them? If you’re like me, most e-mails are just stored for record-keeping or emergencies. The vast majority that you drag to a folder will never need to be read again.
In general, sorting messages into folders by sender is really costly and especially hard to make efficient. Since Outlook can sort, group, and filter based on sender, there isn’t much of a reason to break these out unless the message volume is so huge it would screw up the diversity of the folder (or even push size/performance limits). Same goes for folders by month, etc.
I think people feel very organized and put-together when their insertion cost is high. But, really, the time cost of a really nasty search through a big folder is nothing compared to how long it takes to maintain that level of structure.
I’m taking the same position with filing also. For small projects, I’m just placing all the documents in a mailing envelope labeled with the project name. I’ll probably never look at those again, so maintaining a binder or tabbed folder system would be excess work.
But, all this is contingent upon getting the right buckets set up. And it’s my opinion this is very chancy to pull off on the first try, and it’s much easier to pour two buckets of water together than it is to split it after the fact.