I’m an aerospace engineer-turned-project manager, and for whatever reason, the NASA/contractor community is like this and wants to trade a crapload of emails. [I think it’s because no one ever takes good notes in meetings and few are good with followup action items unless we have someone taking them down, but that’s a discussion point for anotehr day.] So yeah, I get a lot of email, and much of it is discussion.

I’ve learned to adapt an I0 approach; rather than my methodology for personal email, which is sorted to Actions, Archives, and Responses, I have per-project folders for my work email. Admittedly, this is a relic of my pre-GTD days, but I also find that searching is a bit easier when I’ve already sifted the buckets a bit, since I’m seeing 100-200 emails a day coming my way. I generally keep my INBOX to a minimum, and I keep Outlook [I know, I know] up and running [I KNOW] at all times. Being a PM in my organization means being a human inforouter, and I delegate a lot of things that I can’t answer immediately.

On my good days, I have a handful of emails left in my INBOX at the end of the day; when I’m being really good, I put those into Actions to start my day off right in my own personal task-management system [Alex King’s TasksPro] and file the email so I’m staring at a tabula rasa the next morning. [Okay, that’s a lie … I’m staring at the 30 emails that came in between when I left work and when I got at my desk that morning.] Helps me manage it.