As with paper, there are emails that are action-related, reference and archive (i.e. cya) and they require separate systems for managing them.

@Andy – It sounds like you have a system that works for you and I don’t recommend fixing what isn’t broken. Folders do require review and for many, this doesn’t work. I teach my clients to use an electronic task program or a paper-based planning system to manage to-do’s.

I think bloggers could do a better job of at least dropping names here and there of who influenced our ideas. Not just to credit those who had them, but to leave a breadcrumb trail so that others can find their way around the web of ideas more easily.

But borrowing and synthesizing ideas without crediting them seems to an increasingly accepted standard practice. I’d prefer ideas were credited more often, but I’m old enough to realize that my preferences don’t have a whole lot to do with how the world actually works.

Also this Inbox Zero sort of concept has been around in enough forms that it is approaching a kind of public domain status. I did see one blogger over on ThinkSimpleNow flagrantly plagiarize a writer where the ideas were clearly in precisely the same format as the appeared in the author’s book…so there is still some boundary fortunately. This eventually got corrected after the author stumbled across the blog and pointed out the use of his work without credit.

Anyway, no matter how you slice it these were ideas worth sharing again. Thanks for the post.

For example, in your statement just now, you say that we should “try to do better next time.” You aren’t the first person to utter those words, yet you don’t give credit to the millions of people who have said it before you. Do a Google search, with that exact phrase, and you’ll pull up so many pages of responses that our comment box wouldn’t even let you enter all of the sources if you wanted to.

No offense to Merlin, but his idea was less than revolutionary seeing as I (and millions of others) was keeping an empty inbox for years before I read his Inbox Zero document. In fact, I’ve been using “Mailbox Zero” for more than 20 years to keep junk mail out of my house. There is nothing unique about his idea except for the name he attached to it. More importantly, the name of Merlin’s site is 43 Folders — a direct reference to Allen’s Getting Things Done system — but it doesn’t explicitly say “I borrowed the name of this website from a concept introduced in David Allen’s book” on the banner of his website. For Lauren to come to a similar conclusion on her own about keeping an inbox free of incoming e-mails is not surprising seeing as she has been a professional organizer working in people’s offices for years before Merlin Mann even read David Allen’s book.

I have a journalism degree, sat through hours of ethics training, worked for many publications, have a masters degree in English education, and taught classes on plagiarism … NOTHING about Lauren’s post violates any laws, or even walks a close line.

I think it’s great to hear everyone’s different spin on old ideas. And this is a great set of ideas that is really relevant to Unclutterer. But the post could have done a better job of crediting related ideas like Morgenstern and Mann.

This is not meant to be “shame on you”, just “try to do better next time”. We all can do better on this front in the blogesphere. Thanks, and keep the great ideas coming!

Rather than a single Processing folder, I go one step further and seperate out “Action” and “Review” into two folders. It allows me to seperate out things I need to do from things I need to review so I can take care of different stuff depending on my mood.

Before that I tried using the Outlook GTD plugin, but it didn’t meet my needs for some reason. Maybe I needed something that didn’t feel like it got in my way…

These are not Lauren’s ideas. This is Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. I love Unclutterer and everything I’ve seen so far is completely original and very useful. I’m surprised to see that there isn’t even a reference to Mann’s ideas in the article. Credit where credit’s due, Unclutterer.

Thanks, and I look forward to your next post!

It is also a good idea to clear out your SPAM, JUNK and DELETED folders periodically, if your system doesn’t do that automatically.

So for this, I can’t see the reason to declutter.

-Tabs

As a result, my work inbox is cluttered in a way that I would never accept in my home email or in the rest of my life. Give me an extra hour in my day, and I would use it for other purposes… although I agree in premise with what has been written.

*Note this message was written during lunch when I could be archiving but chose to eat and read unclutterer.com.