I have been working on improving the organization of my emails and I have set up some folders for actionable stuff: @Action,for stuff that needs done; @Review, for stuff that may contain actionable stuff but needs more detailed reviewing to determine them and @Waiting, for emails that indicate that I am waiting for others to respond (mostly these are emails I have sent to other people, asking them to do stuff for me). This seems to be working well, but I think that it is not as 'GTD' as it could be.

The emails in my @Action folder can lack clarity and often contain more than one action, which means that there may not be an single, obvious next action to take for each email. So I wonder whether, as part of my email processing, I should be taking time to extract actions from emails into my next action context lists? Sounds sensible, but I am not sure how to relate the actions that are produced back to the emails (particularly because I am swinging towards using lofi, paper and pen lists).

What do you all do in this case? Should I consider my @Action, @Review and @Waiting folders as mini reference folders that I review at regular intervals? I am worried that I will end up with a system that I do not implicitely trust ("has that email been _totally_ dealt with?" / "is this action all I have to do wrt that email?" ...etc).

Cheers,
D