Organising my inbox

I made some recent comments about handling email and mentioned that some of the folders I use may need to change. Well, after a week of the new system it works fine but there are some rough edges. Here's what I've done.

I now have a folder structure that includes the following sub-folders under my inbox:

@Attend to: for emails that I need to do something about but can't do just at the moment (if you are a GTD-er they fall into the "more than 2 minute" category of actions).

@Follow up: For emails that are threads of conversations that I will need to follow up at some point or that I need to track in a non-urgent way.

@Read/review: For emails that (as it says on the can) I want to read and review because they contain something of potential interest that I can't look at right now but don't want to lose sight of.

@Replies no follow up: I have some emails to which I've replied but that don't need following up. I could just put them into the archive folder or delete them, but I've decided that this choice should be part of a review process. So this folder is just a place to store those replies during the week. Then, at the end of the week, I can review them and process them.

@Waiting for: This is for emails I've sent and am waiting for a response from some else.

The "@" symbol means that these folders appear alphabetically directly below my inbox. This is very useful in terms of seeing the folders among the list of folders.

The change has been to add the "read/review" and the "replies no follow up" folders. I found I was looking at emails and wondering where they fitted in my system. I have my main archive, which I review from time to time (hopefully a little more often now I'm getting organised!) and I have different folders for different archives (things like online orders and receipts for example). These new folders give a place to put new emails before they disappear into the vault of my archive. More than that, they allow me to review the status of all current and recent emails on a daily basis without having to wade through too many messages.

The end result is that my inbox is rarely going about 10 messages, and is usually empty once I've processed incoming mail.