My most recent system which I am very pleased with so far consists of only the following four folders:

• Inbox – Only emails with me in the ‘To’ field, kept for three months.
• CCed – Only emails with me in the ‘CC’ field, kept for one month.
• Lists – Any emails that don’t have me in either the ‘To’ or ‘CC’ fields, kept for two weeks.
• Archive – No filters put email in this folder, it is 100% manual, kept forever.

This system has made it easy to filter out the important emails (sent directly to me) from less important emails (which I am typically CCed on) or mailing lists (which seldom require any action).  I use the auto archiving (deletion) feature of my email client which allows me to automatically dispose of emails after a preset period based on the folder they are stored in.

I hope to phase out the archive folder sometime as I use Evernote to store any information I want to be able to find easily at a later date: as a purpose designed note/idea management application it is highly superior for the storing, organising and searching of data.

My solution is the humble Moleskine Weekly Notebook (below).  As the name suggests the weekly notebook is a cunning combination of weekly diary (on the left page) and notebook (on the right page).  This allows me to write my to-do list for the week on the notebook page and record what I do each day on the appropriate section of the diary page.

Having my work log and to-do list in the same physical entity has been a real break-through for me as it means I can track my progress towards my objectives and be able to account for where my time is spent each day.  This has allowed me to analyse my working patterns and evaluate what is taking up time that could be better spent working on the tasks in my to-do list.  Being able to record unexpected events that have taken up time e.g. build breaks or sickness has also proven very useful.

What I don’t use this notebook for is an actual appointment diary or strategic to-do list as I have found through experimentation that there is seldom sufficient space for such things.  I have Microsoft Outlook which does appointment and calendar management and Evernote which does high level strategic tasks lists and note gathering.