Microsoft at home published an article titled “4 ways to take control of your email inbox. In that article, the author talks about the “Four Ds for Decision-Making” in depth. Utilizing the four Ds, will help you decide what to do with all the emails in your inbox, and it will explain what actions you need to take, to finally clean up your inbox today, and how to keep it clean in the future. If you have the time, I would highly suggest that you read this brief article, because it has a lot of great information for making decisions on what to do with all the emails that are in your inbox. Let’s face it, we are going to continue to get more and more emails, because people like to correspond by electronic means, rather than making a simply quick phone call.
To summarize this article, the four choices of what to do with all the email messages in your inbox, are to delete the email, to do something with the email, to delegate someone else to do something with the email, or to defer doing something with the email until a later date.
The hardest choice for some people is deleting emails, because they wonder if they will ever need those deleted emails someday. If you frequently save emails, knowing if you ever access those saved emails will help you decide if you should be continuing to save emails. If you don’t ever access saved emails, then continuing to save them is really a waste of your time and your email providers resources. Just because you use an email provider that gives you unlimited email storage, that is no reason to save every email that you receive, because you still have to manage those emails.
If you are one of the few people that actually access saved emails, like myself, then continue saving selected emails that you think that you might need to access someday, but don’t forget to save those emails in a logically named folder system, so that you will know where you saved them to, and how you can easily access them without having to search through your entire inbox. See my blog titled “Organize your files, folders & emails”, for directions on how to create and use a logically named folder structure.