Putting Emails In Folders Is a Waste of Time, Says IBM Study

An anonymous reader writes "There are two types of office workers in the world — those who file their emails in folders, and those who use search. Well, it looks like the searchers are smarter. A 354-user study by IBM research found that users who just searched their inbox found emails slightly faster than users who had filed them by folder. Add the time spent filing and the searchers easily come out on top. Apparently the filers are using their inbox as a to-do list rather than wanting to categorize information to find it more easily."

Comments

"Reference" folder

[Bodero]

I once read a Best Practices manual for Microsoft Outlook by the Outlook team that changed how I deal with email. The premise is this:

• Have only two folders: Inbox, and Reference.
• When an email comes in and it does not need to be acted on, read it, then move it to Reference.
• If an email needs to be acted upon, leave it in your inbox until the task is complete. This may be hours, days, weeks or months. But everything in your inbox is something that is waiting on someone.

I frequently had a habit of reading emails on my smartphone and forgetting about them. Now, I can either move them to Reference on my phone, or do it when I get back to my desk. But nothing slips through the cracks this way, which was a huge problem when I first got a smartphone.