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In 2011, Whittaker and colleagues published a research paper with the title “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?”. The answer is: yes, you are. People who us

by Rezo 10y ago

In 2011, Whittaker and colleagues published a research paper with the title “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?”. The answer is: yes, you are. People who use the search function find their email more quickly than those who click through carefully constructed systems of folders. I used to organize email into folders meticulously, later using tags and rules. What a complete waste of time. These days I refuse to spend even a second organizing email or reducing my inbox, as I can summon any email even from years ago in a few seconds with fuzzy search terms. Here's another heresy I'm testing that I think may turn out to be true: Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless.

mountaineer22 10y ago
Agreed. This is where the real-world analogy of cabinets and file-folders breaks down. Yet we attempt to emulate it. Some people are horrified or judged based on a user's refusal to use filters and folders, carefully organizing content, and having an empty inbox.
AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
Eh. One day I wanted to practice my BASH foo and wrote some scripts to rsync my files into neat dirs in my /home. 25 minutes later, I never had a file management or organization problem again. Email would be considerably harder to organize in this fashion unless you run your own mailserver.
tdb7893 10y ago
What works for me on my computer is put things into general buckets of downloads, things I don't care about, things I need to keep, and programming projects. This really basic organization allows me to be able to delete lots of files without worry while taking almost no time to organize. With search finding things is easy but deleting everything you don't need can still be hard.
- putterson 10y ago
  I found it striking how similar the system that I have settled into is to yours, and also the similarity of the benefits that you ascribed to it. I love having my /home/name/tmp folder and being able to delete everything in it without worry when I find it becoming a bit crowded. I find that it takes care of most things I don't need but there are a lot of small projects and downloaded libraries that sit in my programming projects directory that are more difficult to delete. All in all I find the organization very relaxing and passive. Roughly the buckets I have are: - Downloads - Documents - workspace (programming projects) - tmp
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    The way I do it on both Linux and Windows is: all the downloads go into Downloads folder. I keep the folder sorted by date (newest top) - 90% of the time I'm looking for something recently downloaded, and for the remaining 10%, I usually have an estimate in my head how old the file is, so I can do a visual binary search on the dates quickly. When I need to free up some space on the drive, I resort the folder by size (descending), and start deleting from the largest files down.
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      And it just occurred to me that along with sort by date (usually modified), we can do sort by accessed date. Which is now what I'm doing with my downloads folder and probably a few more.
    - paulryanrogers 10y ago
      Honestly I feel like the downloads folder is something of a waste. Typically the software there is too old by the time I find myself reinstalling. Perhaps it should be auto purged as things age. Most users probably instinctively move things to be kept elsewhere
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Software is only a portion of my Downloads folder. It's usually a random collection of pictures, music files, videos, documents, spreadsheets, archives with data, archives with code, etc.
- dictum 10y ago
  I also settled into something similar. I only use 4 main directories. One for code projects, one for design projects, ~/Downloads for transient files, ~/Documents for files that don't belong to an specific project. Once in a while I create a YYYY-MM-DD folder, drop the current version of each of those folders, and start again with a clean slate. If I need to edit a file, I just search for it and edit it where it is; if I notice I'm having to edit it often, I may bring it back to its previous folder. If it looks like what a regular user would do, that's exactly why I started doing it. I don't want to care.
Avshalom 10y ago
Yup I am happily humming along at inbox-7000 and never moving anything from firefox's Downloads folder.
- basch 10y ago
  work-inbox-21.5k gmail-inbox-49.5k i cant imagine interacting, sorting, and deleting all those items. search works perfectly every time, never been unable to find a work email. i also cant imagine using email as a todo list over some kind of team/projectmanagement inbox software such as https://www.enchant.com/ https://www.enchant.com/, frontapp, intercom, missive, zendeskinbox, streak, trello, asana etc.
  - jacalata 10y ago
    So, do you just track read-unread? Every email that is read has been pushed to a task management system? I know a lot of people with horrifically stuffed inboxes and I only consider one of them organized - the rest are prone to miss emails, or forget to do whatever they were asked because they read it and then it was in a giant bucket of unimportant stuff.
    - basch 10y ago
      if youre in some kind of support, helpdesk, customerservice, projectmanagement, development scenario and you have it set up correctly, emails are mostly notifications that something happened in the tracking system. customers/employees only EVER email the abstraction layer, not personnel directly. you can either reply to the email and it gets automatically sorted by the software, or you can interact directly in the software itself. so in helpdesk software like enchant, a ticket stays open or held until it is closed. closing the ticket removes the entire conversation from visibility. a reply restores its visibility. if i move a normal email to a folder, and a person sends a replies to it, the conversation becomes fragmented. team inboxes delineate conversations and let you move the entire conversation including future replies. they also force standard practice on a team, so each person doesnt project manage differently. this gives you more transparency, and lets you read each others conversations so everyone can stay on the same page regarding trends or events. talking to the developers, thats not exactly how they intended the software to be used, and internally they close tickets aggressively and move longer term tasks to project management tracking in trello. on the gmail front, their tabs or whatever are a lifesaver. i only check the primary and update tabs daily, the rest is pseudo-junkmail. tldr: to answer your question simply. if i get an email asking for something or that i need to act on, and it didnt come FROM some type of tracking/pm/ticketing software, i forward it to the appropriate software so it is added to the todo list. if youre on a team using task software like https://glip.com/ https://glip.com/ for instance, you add the task directly in the software, you dont email the person.
Ntrails 10y ago
I use my inbox as a to do list, so I'm fairly brutal about keeping it clear. But it's very true - at my previous job I was often able to pull up that one important email from a year or two ago that I vaguely remembered in just a couple of minutes.
antisthenes 10y ago
> Here's another heresy I'm testing that I think may turn out to be true: Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless. As long as the proper files are in the backed up folders, I suspect your theory to hold true.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  Or maybe split them into folders like "Receipts", "Documents", "Books", etc... But beyond that is a cliff of diminishing returns.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    And tags solve that, along with smart folders for common searches.
- galfarragem 10y ago
  It depends. As an housing architect is crutial to have all documents in a predictable order, specially when I don't work alone. A team of architects normally work in the same large set of files, so to simplify collaboration a good file naming system is mandatory. https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd
krylon 10y ago
The worst I have seen is people using the Trash folder to store mail, without eve emptying it. At work, I once had to clean out about 10000 mails from user's mailbox and thought it polite to empty the trash. Oh, was she mad...
- johngalt 10y ago
  The first time I saw this I was floored. After seeing it a few times, I was curious: "what establishes this pattern?", "how do people arrive at thinking of the trash folder as an archive?" In most cases they are using the delete key something like a surrogate for the read/unread flag. Keeping the inbox 'clean' of old email. I tried testing with view filters set to only show unread email, but that didn't work because the read flag is toggled too easily. Effectively they want a button that says "I'm done with you go away" to an email in their inbox.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - krylon 10y ago
    That makes sense. Except for that one guy who had subfolders in his Trash folder. ;-) I tried to explain him that Outlook supports archiving mails and can even do so automatically, but he - like most of us - is a creature of habit, and I quickly stopped. All in all, if it works for these users, I am not going to impose my style of organizing my mailbox on them. But using the Trash for that purpose seems dangerous for the same reason using the trash bin in the office as an archive is.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
The best trick I found so far for managing my inbox is the one I learned from "Deep Work" - just unsubscribe from every goddamn newsletter and notification service that isn't very important to you. I did that over the course of two weeks, and now I get a dozen or so mails a day on my personal account, instead of 100+...
- Taylor_OD 10y ago
  Yes. Every single unwanted email I get I take the time to unsubscribe. I get far less email now and it makes for a much cleaner inbox.
brassic 10y ago
> Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless. Absolutely. I've been practising this for more than 20 years. When the NT 4.0 Option Pack came out in 1998 I was delighted because it gave me a search engine on my desktop and I could stop feeling guilty about my lack of organisation. I don't have trouble finding things.

by Rezo 10y ago

mountaineer22 10y ago

Agreed. This is where the real-world analogy of cabinets and file-folders breaks down. Yet we attempt to emulate it. Some people are horrified or judged based on a user's refusal to use filters and folders, carefully organizing content, and having an empty inbox.

AndrewUnmuted 10y ago

Eh. One day I wanted to practice my BASH foo and wrote some scripts to rsync my files into neat dirs in my /home. 25 minutes later, I never had a file management or organization problem again. Email would be considerably harder to organize in this fashion unless you run your own mailserver.

tdb7893 10y ago

What works for me on my computer is put things into general buckets of downloads, things I don't care about, things I need to keep, and programming projects. This really basic organization allows me to be able to delete lots of files without worry while taking almost no time to organize. With search finding things is easy but deleting everything you don't need can still be hard.

putterson 10y ago
I found it striking how similar the system that I have settled into is to yours, and also the similarity of the benefits that you ascribed to it. I love having my /home/name/tmp folder and being able to delete everything in it without worry when I find it becoming a bit crowded. I find that it takes care of most things I don't need but there are a lot of small projects and downloaded libraries that sit in my programming projects directory that are more difficult to delete. All in all I find the organization very relaxing and passive. Roughly the buckets I have are: - Downloads - Documents - workspace (programming projects) - tmp
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  The way I do it on both Linux and Windows is: all the downloads go into Downloads folder. I keep the folder sorted by date (newest top) - 90% of the time I'm looking for something recently downloaded, and for the remaining 10%, I usually have an estimate in my head how old the file is, so I can do a visual binary search on the dates quickly. When I need to free up some space on the drive, I resort the folder by size (descending), and start deleting from the largest files down.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    And it just occurred to me that along with sort by date (usually modified), we can do sort by accessed date. Which is now what I'm doing with my downloads folder and probably a few more.
  - paulryanrogers 10y ago
    Honestly I feel like the downloads folder is something of a waste. Typically the software there is too old by the time I find myself reinstalling. Perhaps it should be auto purged as things age. Most users probably instinctively move things to be kept elsewhere
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Software is only a portion of my Downloads folder. It's usually a random collection of pictures, music files, videos, documents, spreadsheets, archives with data, archives with code, etc.
dictum 10y ago
I also settled into something similar. I only use 4 main directories. One for code projects, one for design projects, ~/Downloads for transient files, ~/Documents for files that don't belong to an specific project. Once in a while I create a YYYY-MM-DD folder, drop the current version of each of those folders, and start again with a clean slate. If I need to edit a file, I just search for it and edit it where it is; if I notice I'm having to edit it often, I may bring it back to its previous folder. If it looks like what a regular user would do, that's exactly why I started doing it. I don't want to care.

Avshalom 10y ago

Yup I am happily humming along at inbox-7000 and never moving anything from firefox's Downloads folder.

basch 10y ago
work-inbox-21.5k gmail-inbox-49.5k i cant imagine interacting, sorting, and deleting all those items. search works perfectly every time, never been unable to find a work email. i also cant imagine using email as a todo list over some kind of team/projectmanagement inbox software such as https://www.enchant.com/ https://www.enchant.com/, frontapp, intercom, missive, zendeskinbox, streak, trello, asana etc.
- jacalata 10y ago
  So, do you just track read-unread? Every email that is read has been pushed to a task management system? I know a lot of people with horrifically stuffed inboxes and I only consider one of them organized - the rest are prone to miss emails, or forget to do whatever they were asked because they read it and then it was in a giant bucket of unimportant stuff.
  - basch 10y ago
    if youre in some kind of support, helpdesk, customerservice, projectmanagement, development scenario and you have it set up correctly, emails are mostly notifications that something happened in the tracking system. customers/employees only EVER email the abstraction layer, not personnel directly. you can either reply to the email and it gets automatically sorted by the software, or you can interact directly in the software itself. so in helpdesk software like enchant, a ticket stays open or held until it is closed. closing the ticket removes the entire conversation from visibility. a reply restores its visibility. if i move a normal email to a folder, and a person sends a replies to it, the conversation becomes fragmented. team inboxes delineate conversations and let you move the entire conversation including future replies. they also force standard practice on a team, so each person doesnt project manage differently. this gives you more transparency, and lets you read each others conversations so everyone can stay on the same page regarding trends or events. talking to the developers, thats not exactly how they intended the software to be used, and internally they close tickets aggressively and move longer term tasks to project management tracking in trello. on the gmail front, their tabs or whatever are a lifesaver. i only check the primary and update tabs daily, the rest is pseudo-junkmail. tldr: to answer your question simply. if i get an email asking for something or that i need to act on, and it didnt come FROM some type of tracking/pm/ticketing software, i forward it to the appropriate software so it is added to the todo list. if youre on a team using task software like https://glip.com/ https://glip.com/ for instance, you add the task directly in the software, you dont email the person.

Ntrails 10y ago

I use my inbox as a to do list, so I'm fairly brutal about keeping it clear. But it's very true - at my previous job I was often able to pull up that one important email from a year or two ago that I vaguely remembered in just a couple of minutes.

antisthenes 10y ago

> Here's another heresy I'm testing that I think may turn out to be true: Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless. As long as the proper files are in the backed up folders, I suspect your theory to hold true.

s_kilk 10y ago
Or maybe split them into folders like "Receipts", "Documents", "Books", etc... But beyond that is a cliff of diminishing returns.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  And tags solve that, along with smart folders for common searches.
galfarragem 10y ago
It depends. As an housing architect is crutial to have all documents in a predictable order, specially when I don't work alone. A team of architects normally work in the same large set of files, so to simplify collaboration a good file naming system is mandatory. https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd https://github.com/galfarragem/hamster-gtd

krylon 10y ago

The worst I have seen is people using the Trash folder to store mail, without eve emptying it. At work, I once had to clean out about 10000 mails from user's mailbox and thought it polite to empty the trash. Oh, was she mad...

johngalt 10y ago
The first time I saw this I was floored. After seeing it a few times, I was curious: "what establishes this pattern?", "how do people arrive at thinking of the trash folder as an archive?" In most cases they are using the delete key something like a surrogate for the read/unread flag. Keeping the inbox 'clean' of old email. I tried testing with view filters set to only show unread email, but that didn't work because the read flag is toggled too easily. Effectively they want a button that says "I'm done with you go away" to an email in their inbox.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- krylon 10y ago
  That makes sense. Except for that one guy who had subfolders in his Trash folder. ;-) I tried to explain him that Outlook supports archiving mails and can even do so automatically, but he - like most of us - is a creature of habit, and I quickly stopped. All in all, if it works for these users, I am not going to impose my style of organizing my mailbox on them. But using the Trash for that purpose seems dangerous for the same reason using the trash bin in the office as an archive is.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

The best trick I found so far for managing my inbox is the one I learned from "Deep Work" - just unsubscribe from every goddamn newsletter and notification service that isn't very important to you. I did that over the course of two weeks, and now I get a dozen or so mails a day on my personal account, instead of 100+...

Taylor_OD 10y ago
Yes. Every single unwanted email I get I take the time to unsubscribe. I get far less email now and it makes for a much cleaner inbox.

brassic 10y ago

> Spending any effort whatsoever organizing files on your computer is equally worthless. Absolutely. I've been practising this for more than 20 years. When the NT 4.0 Option Pack came out in 1998 I was delighted because it gave me a search engine on my desktop and I could stop feeling guilty about my lack of organisation. I don't have trouble finding things.