The Life-Changing Magic of the Inbox Sort Folder

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Have you ever gone a couple of days without checking your email only to find you have 50 unread messages when you open it?

It can be quite overwhelming.

Cal Newport has a simple hack to deal with this problem:

1. Create a folder in your email inbox named “sort”

2. Pick a topic that describes several of your unread messages

3. Move all messages related to that topic into your sort folder

4. Go into your sort folder and process through these messages until the folder is empty

5. Return to your inbox and loop back to Step 2, looking for another topic that describes multiple messages. Repeat until the inbox is empty

Logically speaking, this trick of moving a group of related messages to a temporary folder before processing shouldn’t make a big difference.

But psychologically speaking, it does help. A lot.

💡 Tackling all related messages one after another ends up being much easier than reading emails in a less structured manner.

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