Don’t organize your inbox

Introduction

Do you spend lots of time organizing all your emails because it saves you time in the future? Well, let me try convincing you why sometimes staying unorganized saves you more time - especially with emails.

Sort & Search

For the past 6 years, anyone that has seen my inbox has told me to make folders and organize my inbox. However, I never saw a point in doing so (for very important emails or those that I would want to see very often, I would star them).

Only until today, my actions were justified by a book I was reading: ‘Algorithms to Live By’. The authors applies knowledge of Sorting in computer science to emails. You sort (organize) and search for your emails. If sorting takes up hours of your time, but only saves up a couple seconds for searching, there’s really no point in sorting - it’s a big waste of time!

Quote

Quoting the book mentioned above, “Sometimes mess is more than just the easy choice. It’s the optimal choice.” I found this quote really relatable to how I have managed my inbox and wanted to share it.

So if you are like me and never organize your inbox, don’t think that you are procrastinating, you are actually being efficient with your time. However, if you want to continue organizing your emails because you like to stay organized - think about the ratio of the time spent between sorting and searching.