Secondly, it can take quite a bit of effort to decide where an email should go-does an email from your colleague about why they might miss a project deadline go into the folder for that project? The folder for that person? A lessons-learned folder?-and decision making is both time-consuming and draining. That’s quite a bold statement, so a little justification is needed.įirstly, a hierarchy of folders takes time to set up and maintain, time that would be better spent handling your emails. They shouldn’t go into one of several hundred carefully organized folders they should go into one Archive folder. Your emails should go into an Archive folder. RELATED: Forget Inbox Zero: Use OHIO to Triage Your Emails Instead Where You Should Archive Your Emails With that in mind, you need to handle an email (reply to/forward it, turn it into a task, set up a meeting) and then either delete the email or archive it. The bottom line: There’s no point keeping all of your emails in your inbox and plenty of good reasons not to. It’s much harder to find specific emails, it makes your mail client work more slowly (even if you access your email through a browser like Gmail), and it can use up your storage if you use the Outlook or Apple Mail on your phone. When you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox, they quickly get buried. A quick recap from our OHIO article: your inbox is not an archive, a bin, a filing cabinet, or a dumping ground.