I have arrived to the second post in the series about my email filing routines, addressing the question how I file. There are two aspects that I would like to explain. This post covers the way I actually file and a future post will explain how I have structured my folder hierarchy.
Actually I have found that that I (and other people I have worked with) have 4 types of behaviour for email filing, depending on the situation we’re in, as shown in the graph below.

There are two dimensions in this graph, one external and one internal. The vertical dimension is external. It is the stress level that our professional lives put on us. This “temperature” of our professional life will fluctuate over time and is not entirely under our control. The second dimension is horizontal and characterises our filing behaviour from structured and disciplined on the left to completely unstructured on the right. It is internal in the sense that it is almost entirely under our control.
Each of the quadrants in the graph corresponds to a type of filing behaviour:
1. Regular Filing.
This corresponds to the lower left quadrant. It is the ideal situation with professional stress at a relatively low level and a structured approach for managing our inboxes. Obviously we were all in this state when we just started using email. I think it’s near impossible to permanently stay in this state unless we have a system like GTD in place.
2. Priority Filing.
When stress levels rise, our disciplined approach is put under more and more pressure and we move up along the vertical axis to arrive in the upper left quadrant, doing Priority Filing. This is the approach for inbox management that I explained in the post about the inbox as radar. It is highly priority driven, is far from perfect but represents a delicate equilibrium between the different requirements.
3. Catch-up cleaning.
This is the lower right quadrant. It represents another way to move away from the ideal situation, but this time caused by our own lack of discipline. The situation typically arrives when we are not under a lot of stress, so can handle our inbox in a more unstructured ad-hoc way. For me personally it is a behaviour that often accompanies creative phases, when correctly handling my inbox is the least of my concerns.
4. Emergency cleaning.
This is the upper right quadrant. We arrive there when one of the two intermediate cases degrades further, either because of a gradual loosening of discipline or because of increased or maintained stress, or a combination of the two. This is the worst case and it is very close to an email bankruptcy situation.
The key point here is that we should try to maintain the zen state of mind in the lower left, but are pulled to the critical situation in the upper right by two forces, shown by the grey arrows in the graph above:
1. External Pressure. This force is primarily driven by an externally imposed increase of workload and pressure. First we’ll be pulled up into the top left quarter, doing Inbox Priority Filing, but no matter how disciplined we are in doing that, it is not perfect. Some emails slip through the cracks and with each such email, the clutter in our inbox gradually increases. When the external pressure persists, this situation can ultimately lead to a vicious cycle where stress and the cluttered inbox enforce each other. In that case we’ll inevitably end up in the upper right quarter doing Emergency Cleaning.
2. Lack of Discipline. This force is in our heads and its full impact hits us when we least expect it. What happens is that our stress-free, almost empty, inbox gives us a false sense of security and we get sloppy. At first that is not a problem: we are in a calm period after all, so we gradually shift from the lower left to the lower right, with our filing becoming more ad-hoc, turning into Catch-up Cleaning. So far so good, but then something happens and the stress level spikes, catching us completely off guard. We’re badly prepared to deal with this and the risk of a mutually enforcing disorganisation and stress spiral becomes very real again, which would lead us again into the Emergency Cleaning upper right quarter.
If these two forces are trying to pull us into the dangerous upper right quadrant, how do we get back in calmer waters? Going down the right side is the easiest, because the second force fluctuates with the stress level. This represents a full cycle that I have observed in many cases. It starts off with the stress increasing, moving to a situation of Priority Filing (upper left) and our inboxes getting out of control after a while. Then, in the second half of the cycle, we get a bit more breathing space and start cleaning up our inboxes (swearing “not to let this happen, ever again”), gradually regaining control over them and moving back to Catch-up Cleaning. Finally we’re back to where we started: with a fully controlled clean inbox, doing Regular Filing.
Knowing all this, what can we do about it? Can we prevent these forces from pushing us into the direction of more stress an disorganisation? Well, in the end it mostly boils down to managing the horizontal dimension, i.e. our own discipline, which is the only factor we control. We can accomplish this by sticking to rigorous inbox management routines, supported by tools like Tagwolf. That way we are definitely able to stay on the left side of the graph and most of the time in the lower left quadrant, with the occasional spike into the upper left during busy periods.