43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Archiving emails - what do you do?

For the longest time I have been the mad professor of email folders, with tons of separate folders organized by subject (particular clients, administrivia, personal, etc.). I have been fairly religious about keeping my inbox empty and use a fairly rigorous system of filters and popfile to tag, categorize, and redirect incoming email into the proper folder.

I've been looking at Merlin's three-folder system as well as Gina Trapani's Trusted Trio action-based system and they make a lot of sense to me.

But one flaw with these systems is they don't account for long-term storage of emails after they've passed through the Action|Hold|Archive process.

So, how do you handle the archiving of email? I run Mac OS X and while spotlight does a pretty good job of finding email, I would assume that at some point having some kind of folder hierarchy is still necessary. Or is it?

About neilio

neilio's picture

Bio

Neil is a nerd hailing from Canada who rarely ever posts to his personal site - a fact that fills him with uncharacteristic sullen moodiness. He spends his days twirling macs, cats, web sites, and one stupendously cute baby boy above his head while enjoying good, strong cups of coffee.

 
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