As Get Rich Slowly has gained readership, I've become increasinly unable to process the e-mail. After reading Tim Ferriss' The Four-Hour Workweek, I'm tempted to hire an Indian "personal assistant" to take care of e-mail for me! (Okay, not really.) I do my best to reply to pressing issues, but a lot of stuff gets lost in the cracks.

I know that the best thing for me to do is to get an empty inbox, and then process each message as it comes in. One key to this is to only process e-mail a couple of times a day, I think, instead of constantly like I do now.

I just spent the past hour filtering e-mail. I think I took care of about 100 messages. My inbox still contains 331 messages, but I'm tired. I've decided that sorting e-mail is *exactly* the sort of thing I should do later this afternoon (and tomorrow and Sunday) as I sit in the driveway, tending our garage sale. I won't be able to focus on long entries, so this chore can finally get done.

331 messages -- yikes.

For the record, I receive about 500 messages a day, though only a small fraction of those end up in my inbox. (About half are spam. Another 40% are blog comments and get routed to mailboxes for the proper blog. Another bunch are mailing lists, etc. that also get routed to special mailboxes.)

My in box has never been and wil never be zero. I keep everything. I know it isn't the most efficient method, but it works. And it allows me to go back and find stuff from long ago which has saved my butt at work on more than one occasion.

Periodically I'll spend an hour sorting and deleting crap I don't need but currently I have a few thousand e-mails in my in-box.

Oh, I keep almost ever message. I only delete those that I know are ephemeral. Last fall I moved to a new system, though, where the inbox represents unprocessed messages. Most new messages are filtered to one of a number of boxes. (For example, there's a big box for Get Rich Slowly.) 25-50 messages a day actually end up in my inbox. I also drag messages from the filtered boxes to the inbox if they need a reply. My goal is to have the inbox empty. That means I've replied to everything that needs a reply.

Sounds like you've already got filters to route most of your incoming mail to specific mailboxes, and presumably you prioritize those boxes in terms of which ones are likely to need your attention and which boxes you can safely ignore.

So really all you need to do is deal with the unsorted mail that ends up in your main in-box. This is one area where using the Mac's mail app is a bit of a handicap; maybe Entourage is better. In Windows I use Outlook to manage my inbox and it's brilliant: for every incoming email message that requires me to do something, I simply drag it over to my task button and it becomes a to-do task. I assign it a deadline and reminder, and file the email away in the appropriate box (I have about 6 mailboxes that I use to sort my messages, although if you have a good desktop search tool like Spotlight on the Mac, or Google Desktop or Yahoo Desktop Search for Windows, you don't really need to organize your archives as you can find any email on any topic in about five seconds). If an incoming message is about an appointment or meeting, I drag it over to my calendar button and it becomes a calendar item.

Unless things are really busy, I can usually keep the number of message in my in-box down to 20 or fewer. Right now things are busy and I have about 65 items in there, but that's unusual.

An old boss of mine used a trick to quickly respond to common questions from clients that deserved an in-depth answer: He created the full response and saved it as a signature in his email program. So it was basically boilerplate text that he could personalize/tweak. Maybe that would help. I'm sure you get lots of similar questions over and over.

I will say, I did get inspired to clean up my inbox so thanks for posting this. I just spent about 15 minutes setting up filters. I'm not as worried about CYA now so I'm ok with filing things away and I have lots of subscriptions so I just created a few large categories (blog, travel, money, etc) that my various alerts and subscriptions will go. So now basically all I'll get are my personal e-mails which will be good.

Thanks for the inspiration.

That's a good idea, Alicia. I've already created a FAQ response, though I haven't implemented it. If I were smart, I'd simply trim around the appropriate part of the response when I reply. I'd like to route a lot of the people here with their questions and comments. I think the forums would be a good place for them...

JD,

Have you thought of setting up an auto-responder to e-mails that come in through that address? It could have your FAQ and a link to the forums (that's a good way to take the pressure off of just you and build the community - good idea). Then you could say that you'll do your best to get back to them personally, particularly if the question is something outside of the FAQ.

That way you have a bit less pressure to respond immediately...

Just a thought.

I have auto responders for many of my business e-mail account with a generic "thanks for contacting us, we'll get back to you ASAP" or, in the case of my newsletter, a welcom and instructions on how to unsubscribe if necessary.

I love my filters. I use mozilla as my primary e-mail client at home. and use IMAP so that I can access via webmail when I'm not home. I live mozilla open all the time, so generally, everything gets filtered before I look at it even when using the webmail interface. Most of the mailing lists get pulled from the server and are only on the local machine, as I pretty much never need to have access to those right away. Then I have folders for family/personal mail the filters trigger on the sender addresses.

I'm trying to work to get it to the point where at the end of the day the inbox is empty, but I'm not quite there yet. I also use gmail for the high-volume/low-priority lists. Makes it easy to scan subjects or search for stuff later if I remember something I want to check on. So far this has kept me balanced between the empty inbox that I'd prefer and the email bankruptcy that I'm prone to.

End of day one: I've dropped the inbox from 331 messages to 64 messages. That sounds good, but each remaining message requires a more detailed response. Two more days left on this project. (Fortunately, I got two GRS entries out of the first 157 messages.)

alternatively, you could have GRS questions routed to Jethro or myself and we may be able to help direct people to appropriate blog posts and/or forum posts

thats what we, the unpaid help, are here for JD!

I use a zero inbox at work. The best way I've found to keep it that way it to turn off all email reminders. Then I just check it periodically.

I've also found that the more I do it, the easier it is to categorise stuff as action / waiting / reference (can you tell I'm a GTD person?).

If its still too much to handle, then you'll have to pass some on to someone else to answer, or accept that you just can't answer everything.

P'raps if you have the FAQ set up, you can point someone there when relevantand that will cut down on the amount of time stuff takes.