Ultra high volume email workflow

In my last years at Apple, if I had no workflow in place, it was not impossible to get over a thousand emails a day. When I would visit people’s offices, I would see two main workflows:

• An inbox with 50,000+ emails in it, mostly unread

• A hundred or more mailboxes, one for each mailing list, also with high unread counts

Sure, there is a ton of garbage emails, such as automated emails or irrelevant mailing lists you can’t subscribe from. But I developed a system that worked for me and I was able to never have an unread message and was able to always find the most important ones.

The very simplest version of it looked like this. For a smaller flow of email, it could work well, but I ended up beefing it up a bit.

The decision process I would go through was this:

• Is the message automatically important? (Inbox)

• Do I need to manually determine the value of this message? (Triage)

• Is there anything of value in this message? (Keep)

• Is this message definitely worthless? (Trash)

Let’s go through each of th…