The X1 Blog

(Originally posted March 24, 2010)

According to a 2009 report from Deloitte:

“During 2009, on average office workers are expected to send more than 160 messages daily and check their inboxes more than 50 times, in all dedicating up to two hours each day to email.”

With an average of 160 message sent daily, information is becoming increasingly staggered. The days of lengthy, thought-out emails are gone. Today, most emails are short, individual thoughts, sent when they reach top-of-mind. What this means is that potentially important information can easily be lost in long email threads or simply pushed out of view in your inbox.  

Due to increases in server space and companies allocating more memory for emails, the impetus to clean out our inboxes has disappeared. Everything can be kept, but with that increased freedom comes the herculean task of finding the right email at the right time.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits is still a proponent of purging the inbox and minimizing the amount of emails you’re left with by using structured organization methods. But how do you know what you’re NOT going to need? The best solution is to organize, add more metadata, and refrain from deleting potentially valuable information. By putting your emails in folders, flagging tasks, and adding items to lists you increase the ways in which you can search and consequently find the message you’re looking for.  Of course, many X1 users have abandoned the practice of putting emails and documents into a folder structure because they can always “X1 it” to find exactly what they are looking for, regardless of its location!