There’s no avoiding it. We all spend a ton of time in our inbox. And here’s the thing, the most efficient way to use your inbox to make sure that you are as productive as possible is not to organize your emails into folders. I don’t want to debate it today.
I’m going to get right into the science so that we can put this debate to an end. IBM did a long-range study with over 345 participants who conducted over 85,000 refinding actions. A whopping sample size to say the least. And what they discovered is pretty incredible. The results found, and I quote, searching through your inbox is much faster.
On average, it took participants 66.07 seconds to search for an email and 72.87 seconds to find an email in a folder. Now you might be saying to yourself, well, Brandon, that’s just six seconds or so. Well, one, those six seconds add up. I don’t know about you, but I’ve searched thousands of emails over my career, in my personal and business life.
But that’s not the end of the story, because that didn’t include the people who filed their emails time to actually file all the emails. And here’s what the study said about that. I quote, you might expect folder access to be more successful than search. because you have made deliberate efforts to organize messages in specific memorable categories.
But search is so much more efficient at the end of the day because it takes you so long to organize and sift through your folders. So, if you’re one of those people who says, I’m going to organize my folders because it just makes me feel better, then do that. But if you want to follow the science and you want to be as efficient and productive as possible, leave your emails in your inbox and just search for them. And I’m not just throwing it out there. I actually have practiced this for probably the last five years and my life is just less stressful.
Yes, search in email still sucks. for the most part.
However, I can generally find what I’m looking for and the science supports that even with a search that really isn’t that good, it’s still faster than organizing your emails.
Your move.
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