1) make a folder called inbox-archive
2) copy entire inbox into this folder
3) work out of your now empty inbox and try to knock off your “archives” as fast as you can

Good luck!

Lol, what an ironic way to end a blog-post.

2 points. In Jeremy’s post, I posted a short 2/3-step guide on how to deal with mail. I believe it works quite effectively and am pretty sure it reflects Merlin’s method as well. The underlying principle is not to respond to every mail but deal with all mail, aka an action-based method.

As far as length is concerned, I don’t really see why people need a guide for that (hence my rant about self-help a few months ago). Sometimes 2 words suffice, sometimes an essay. It’s all varied and highly personal.

Second, after having used Facebook for a few weeks now and seeing most of my communication moving there, I believe that a closed network is a good solution to much of the useless mail we get (around 99% for me). I see much communication moving there and hope there will be an api in the future to shift it to mail-clients.

As a general note, I think people need to remember or pay attention to how they interact with real people in the real world and apply this to the digital realm. Even though we sit in front of them, we are not machines. We only have so much bandwidth for information, and we should listen to our own subconscious signals (stress, fatigue, headache, etc.) to know when too much is too much.

…sorry for the long response. Probably should’ve written a blogpost about it.