If you’re like me then your life revolves around email. It is your personal and work central nervous system - your 21st Century digital command centre!

Unfortunately the grip that email now has on all our lives creates as many problems as it solves.

Does any of the following sound familiar to you?

• You receive vast numbers of emails I receive over 100 a day, not including spam - I know others receive a lot more.
• You have over 25 different labels/folders for filing email I had almost 80!
• You clear your inbox no more than once a week Achieving the much fabled Inbox Zero is a task that would take hours of my time.
• You leave items in your inbox so you don't forget about them Dave Allen would give me a big slap round the face for this one!
• You use starred items as a way of marking emails for your attention That's what starred items are for, right?
• Your have several pages of starred items For me, achieving Inbox Zero meant nothing more than moving all my emails to a slightly less visible glory hole.
• You often unintentionally forget to respond to some emails You may not mean it, but you just look rude.
• You often intentionally ignore some emails Well... that IS rude!

I’ll be honest, I was guilty of all of the above. My email was a mess. I’ve known I needed to change the way I do email for well over a year, but for some reason I kept putting it off.

The thought of all the time and effort I’d put in to meticulously categorizing and filing every single email I’d received over 4 years was too much to contemplate starting afresh.

If all this sounds familiar then maybe you’re in a similar position to where I was a couple of weeks ago. But let me ask you this:

How many times have you ever needed to refer back to those emails from months or years ago? When you’ve had to, how did you find them? Via your archaic filing system, or did you just search for them?

It struck me that I was spending literally hours and hours every week maintaining a system that was inefficient, ineffective, and when it came down to it, I didn’t even use!

Time to change

My personal choice of email platform is Gmail. I won’t give Gmail the big sell here. If you use it, you’ll know why I love it. I will keep referring to ‘labels’ but if you don’t use Gmail I’m sure you can apply the following using folders too.

The first thing to do is get rid of every single existing label. Yes, all of them! Don’t think about it or worry about it, just do it. Get rid of them.

Now that’s done, lets GTD up your email. Create the following labels:

• @action This is where you put emails that really need a response or some other action completed ASAP.
• @deferred This is where you put emails that need a response or action, but can wait until tomorrow or later in the week.
• @someday The good old someday/maybe file. You don't want to forget about the stuff in here you, but you don't want to worry about them until some time in the future.
• @waiting This where you put emails that require an action from you, but you're waiting on someone else first.

Those four labels are going to transform your life. The rules are simple:

• Focus on your @action label, not your inbox. These things need to be done, so be disciplined.
• Check your inbox 2-4 times a day. If it's crap, just delete it. If it has an action that can be done in less than 2 minutes, just do it. Everything else needs to be filed against one of the core labels defined above. Inbox Zero!
• Check your @deferred label once or twice a day. Move anything that needs attention into the @action label.
• Similarly check the @waiting label once or twice a day. If you need to, send someone a chaser.
• Check the @someday folder when you have some downtime. You may be able to promote some emails into the @deferred or @action folder.

On top of those four core labels you will likely have a few other contexts against which you need to file your emails. These will vary from person to person depending on your individual circumstances, but these are mine:

• F/freeagent I use Freeagent Central to do my accounts. So I have loads of receipts and stuff that just needs to be put into Freeagent when I get the chance. I store all those emails here and clear it every couple of weeks.
• F/hot leads All my business leads that I want to keep a very close eye on and not lose track of get filed in here.
• F/cold leads Similar to above, but I'm less concerned about these leads and might leave them a few months before following up.
• F/server alerts I look after 2 servers which are configured to send me various alerts. Most of these are just standard logwatch or firewall alerts. They don't need to come in to my inbox so I have configured a Gmail filter to put them straight into this file, which I check once a day.

Those four labels sort out all my loose ends. But on top of those, I create a series of additional project-based labels for my current projects. I prefix each of these labels with a P/ which keeps them grouped together.

The important thing to remember about project labels is that they are transitional - they exist for the lifetime of the project, then the label gets deleted. If I ever need to refer back to anything, that’s what search is for.

The final thing I do is use Gmail’s settings to hide the less frequently used labels and add a spot of colour-coding - all purely optional.

The results

Since adopting this system (which admittedly was only a week ago), the benefits have been:

• I achieve Inbox Zero every single day. That alone fills me with joy.
• I feel in total control. I know what actions my email bares and how much time I need to allocate for email-related activity.
• But funnily enough I believe I'm spending less time actually administering my email.
• I've found time to respond to some emails that previously I might not have bothered with.
• I feel on top of my work in general. Despite being incredibly busy with client work, easing the email burden makes focusing on project work much easier.
• And if you want proof of this, I've published three blog posts since implementing this system. Compare that with my previous blog rate of less than one a month.

I know many people will already be running a system like this. I got my inspiration from some of the many, many, Gmail-GTD posts out there. But I also know some people will be in a similar position to me with labels coming out of every orifice.

If that’s you, I encourage you to give this system a try. And then come and tell me about it!