“Treat Email Like Milk, Not Precious Relics.”
With the unlimited storage now offered by Gmail and Outlook, you might be tempted to never delete your emails. But that’s not the road to Inbox Zero. To do this, you need to change your mindset.
A tidbit from Merlin Mann who invented the Inbox Zero practice might be the approach you need:
Stop thinking of emails as precious heirlooms and start treating them like a pint of milk. Perishable milk with a time stamp that gets less fresh every day until it smells strange and just needs to be thrown away. Believe me, there will always be more of them.
Mann rightly says that the relevance of an email is directly proportional to its age. The older an email gets, the less important it becomes. So you usually don’t have much of a reason to save them. At best, you can archive such emails and move on. In short, learn to separate from your digital relics and manage your sentient space instead.
Zero Mailbox: Best Practices to Stay (Nearly) Zero | 43Folders