Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad
(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)
Your kids collect stones and sticks. You collect emails, and probably browser tabs and desktop icons. When you move to new PC, all your desktop files ends up in a directory called New folder on the new pc’s desktop and the journey to fill the new desktop starts over before you have New folder and New folder 2 on the upcoming pc.
It's beautiful. Thanks to Moore's law, you can always fit all historical data in half your latest disk space. Though I personally tend to call them "Stuff" or "Junk".
But don't do
Stuff
Junk
That's a rookie strategy, do
Stuff /
Stuff / Stuff
Stuff / Stuff / Junk / ...
When you need to find something old, just go down the folders until you start finding files from the right decade.
You should only organize things as you actually use them. The things you use are then generally organized and you haven’t wasted a bunch of time organizing stuff you never use.
If you do decide to organize a bunch of stuff you never use, that decision is then totally aesthetic, so you should choose a method of doing it that you find aesthetically pleasing.
Source: obsidian user who spent a bunch of time organizing stuff he never uses.
I largely agree, that's why I've still got all of it stored away, but I guess I'd like to keep track of what is it that I'm not using, what can I delete and what can I deduplicate.
I moved my SSD from my old computer into my new one. Because I'm a masochist who manually sets up my partitions with custom labels, it literally worked the first time I booted it. (The only change I did was swapping to the AMD microcode from the Intel microcode because of the processor in my new machine being different). When upgrading SSDs, I just replicated the same partition structure on the new disk and copied everything over with rsync, which also "just worked".
I still can't decide whether these strategies are obvious and intuitive or if they go against literally everything I've learned about what should be feasible. Can't argue with the results though!
Trash, Archive, Folders in Folders, Tags, forget it!
Where is it? In the Inbox. If it's unread, I need to do something, if it's read, I don't.
Although if my clients start to slow down, I will export and delete the oldest year from my personal email. So I guess I do technically archive. But only in bulk and begrudgingly.
I’m in the same camp. Unread vs read is all I need. Also it’s funny when I’m with someone from the “inbox zero” camp and they get stressed seeing my 6-figure inbox count.
Exactly so. If I'm going to do anything with it later, I'll have to read it again anyway.
It's self-culling with time. I've got unread messages deep down on the list. Things that I wanted to do something about months ago, but never did, and they weren't important enough to come up again. And if they ever do come up again, I can see that I received a message and didn't do anything with it.
And then while checking your email you mindlessly click it and realize its the one you have "snoozed" by marking it unread, so you need to mark it unread again.
Now I have a keystroke that will automatically create a TODO with a link to the message. I hit the keystroke and then archive so it no longer shows up in my inbox.
There are lots of poor productivity books/hacks, but the "Do not treat your inbox as a TODO list" has stood the test of time.
Sorry, but unless I can manage my email with sensible rules, I'm not going to manage it.
I need to be able to have rules that let me move email automatically after it's been read or after it's been in the Inbox for some time. But that's not really possible with most server side rules engines (they only look at mail when it arrives), client side rules engines are dead and I don't use email from a fixed desktop machine anyway, and I'm not going to write an imap based filtering engine (I did it once on company equipment, and it wasn't fun enough to do it again).
If you need more inspiration, I used to use Pegasus Mail, and I'd have a small number of filters on Inbox open: there were some lists I was on that didn't need to ever be in the inbox, and most of my filters on Inbox close: move read or timed out mail into folders it belonged; read mail with no other rule would end up in Archive/YYYY-qQ; I found quarterly was the best granularity, monthly archive folders were too fiddly. But modal flow like that isn't very current.
Pegasus Mail was very good when it owned the mail (pop3), and works ok with a competent IMAP server, but work switched to Exchange and it was very slow, and Pegasus didn't work well with a slow IMAP server. That was the start of my slide into inbox 40k :(
Just keep everything in your inbox, find recent things by scrolling down, and anything beyond that is basically inaccessible, since the search is so bad
(I'm in camp archive everything, delete nothing; but see the Neither camp frequently in colleagues)