I knew that my e-mail inbox was out of control for quite a while; I just couldn’t think of what to do about it. Last week, however, a colleague showed me an article from MacWorld on how to organize your inbox so that it isn’t constantly full. It’s an absolutely brilliant idea: your incoming messages should be organized according to workflow, not category. It has tamed my inbox like nothing else I’ve tried. Yesterday was the start of my second week using this new approach, and I gotta say, it is the bomb diggity.

I’ve got dozens of folders, or mailboxes, set up in my email client, and I organize my messages like I do my documents: by the category of the content. I’ve got a folder for Humor, for Letters, for Receipts, for Shareware, and so forth. Yet my inbox was regularly showing a number of messages in the triple digits, and sometimes well over a thousand.

Why? Because I don’t want to file the message until I’m completely done with it. To file something is to say that its journey among the crevasses of my cranium is at an end. Out of sight, out of mind. Of course, by the same principle, when the message finally becomes irrelevant, it’s scrolled so far up the top of the screen that I forget to go back and file it, and the incoming messages accrue like silt.

The genius of the new scheme is that incoming messages get out of the inbox without being “filed”, because the new folders are organized according to the messages’ position in my workflow. It helps to have them be visually organized right under the inbox. They’re still active, but they’re not interfering with each other, like they do when they’re all stacked together.

In a nutshell, you create subfolders of your inbox named Respond, Action, Hold, Waiting, and Archive. (I also added Review, for others’ work that I have to review.) As soon as messages come in, you read them and file them at once in one of these other folders. Exception: if you can respond to and file the message in less than 5 minutes, you take care of it right away. Then you work off items in the folders according to their role.

Here’s everything I like about this scheme:

• I get to look at a clean inbox most of the time. This tells me that I have no burning emergencies, and it’s psychologically satisfying, like a clean desk.

• When I’m responding to messages in the Respond folder, I’m not distracted by other parts of my job, like the messages on which I’m waiting for someone else, longer-term actions, or things that I just want to hold onto for awhile. I’m much more effective when I concentrate on one thing at a time.

• Getting to file or delete messages out of Respond, Action, and Review is very satisfying and feels exactly like crossing something off a to-do list, which is a big part of my personal reward system.

A final part of the Macworld scheme is to stop checking your email so often. Correspondence is a real job, and answering mail every time new stuff shows up consumes much more time than sitting down and dealing with it three or four times a day. Checking messages too often actually lowers your IQ by 10 points—more than the 4 points you would lose if you smoked pot on the job. Just say “no” to reactive e-mailing…