Email in and of itself isn’t bad. Even large volumes of email isn’t bad. I love reading relevant information that does not require anything of me, so any lists that I belong to or bulk mail that I subscribe to - all of that is no big deal. Hell, anyone that subscribes to RSS feeds knows what I’m talking about. Passive reading is fun.
Our email tools haven’t changed appreciably in 10 years.
Email becomes a problem when it requires action of us, even if that action is to simply need to think about something. It becomes “something” hanging out there, unresolved. This is why Filers love emptying their inbox as regularly as possible; it means that there are no unresolved items hanging around (at least not email-related ones).

Although I still can’t understand the mindset of a Piler, I’ve come to accept that they have a real emotional need to keep everything in their inbox, and that’s okay too. They still deal with the same issues, those of unresolved emails that hang around nagging them. They just (hopefully) use a different way to flag the unresolved ones.

(My views of email Filers vs. Pilers)

But the real problem here is that the tools we use every day to deal with our email haven’t changed appreciably for almost 10 years. But the content of email sure has. Most of the email I receive these days is extremely action-oriented; I need to do something or get some result before I can finish handling that email. And the best email and personal productivity tool available to me, Microsoft Outlook, by default handles that situation extremely poorly.

I’ve come to use a number of tools in addition to Outlook to help my email situation, and although some of them have competing feature sets, I find them all useful in their own ways, together. I’m planning a post outlining what I perceive to be the best current solution to handle the influx of email we all experience these days. For now, I’ll leave you with one thought: SNARF is not the answer. It’s a nice idea (actually a very good idea), but is very poorly executed, to the point of being virtually unusable.

Tune in later to find out what I consider to be the crucial set of features to un-break email (to paraphrase* a concept by my friend Marc Orchant).

* Can you paraphrase a concept? I guess I just decided that you can.