Excellent Advice on how to handle email from Founder, Stuart Roseman of @Sanebox

I have been using Sanebox for a few months now, and apart from the excellent application which has been an amazing tool for overcoming the tyranny of thousands of emails, the support from Sanebox is amazing. I asked Sanebox for some advice on how to overcome the thousands of emails and reminders I had and the founder Stuart Roseman personally replied with some brilliant advice:

a) If it takes less than 2 minutes, just do it. don’t defer it.

b) Treat the email like a text message. just your answer. nothing more. no dear …, no signature, no nice humanity

c) No more filing. trust gmail search. click either “remove label” or “archive”

d) Stop putting stuff in your eye line that doesn’t deserve it. newsletters, receipts, shipping notices, etc… Don’t train those into your Inbox ever. Do you get CC’ed on a lot of stuff?

If it takes less than 2 minutes, don’t defer it. Just do it.

X% just do it now
Y% forward to someone else for processing
Z% decide this issue will never be that important and you aren’t going to deal with it. So simply trash or archive it.
W% put these off into the future **when** they **will** be the “most” important thing for you to deal with

I am doing my best to follow this advice. I can see my in box already climbing down rapidly from (seriously) 10,000+ unread emails.