We pride ourselves on building a highly flexible Outlook Add-in that can be adapted to your individual email management process, whatever it may be. So, whether you’re a piler or a filer, there are features in IMS that will ultimately help you save many hours a week and reduce your email and job related stress. Along those lines, we continue to invest in new features to help both kinds of email users.
That said, I’m decidedly in the filer camp and start to feel some amount of anxiety when my Inbox has over 10 messages in it. Because of this, I find myself having a lot of interesting conversations with folks who are the polar opposite; people who begrudgingly empty their Inbox only when they have to due to size limitations.
It looks like Merlin Mann has encountered the same time of resistance, so he has posted his take on what to do if your organizational culture is such that you receive many long, conversational email threads throughout the day that require more than a few minutes of your time:
“Every time I give the Inbox Zero talk to a tech-heavy group — and most especially when I talk with engineers — there’s pushback on a couple issues. First, a lot of techies say they love it when everything gets routed through email, and second, they think an Inbox-Zero-type methodology isn’t particularly useful for the type of communication that they get all day long. And that’s conversations. Lots of conversations.”
For folks who match this description, Merlin has posted six tips that map very nicely to IMS features – threading, processing, filtering, standards, muting and save and search. It’s definitely worth taking a look if you’re still weighing whether emptying your Inbox will work for you. And if you do decide to take the plunge, see this post in intelligently emptying your Inbox.