Empty your inbox with the Trusted Trio

Gina’s written up a post on her modified version of the email setup I laid out in my MacWorld Inbox Makeover article. She’s stripping down to three email folders (besides the inbox), and seems to be having good results with the action-oriented results:

Action
These messages represent tasks you must complete; whether that’s a response that will take more than two minutes (anything less than that, just respond on the spot!) or some sort of an action. All these messages represent an item on your to do list…

Archive
The Archive folder is your long-term email reference library. Place all the messages that contain information you may want to retrieve at some point in the long term future in Archive. Any completed threads, completed requests, memo’s you’ve read, questions you had answered, and completed project email goes into Archive. Basically, whenever an email is “closed” but you may find it useful at some point in the future place it in Archive…

Hold
The Hold folder is a temporary holding pen for important messages you’ll need quick access to within the next few days. If you’re waiting on someone else to get back to you with crucial information, or you’re maintaining a thread about a time-sensitive topic, keep it in the Hold folder. For you GTDers, items in the Hold folder might correspond with items in the next few weeks in your tickler file.

She also includes some tips for staying up to date that are a nice complement to the Inbox Zero series.

Great work as always, Gina! Rock on.