Email Productivity: Organized Structure or Searchable Pile?

Google with Gmail were early innovators in hosted email clients. The original Gmail implementation argued that you did not have to worry at all about inbox structure and that only two things mattered: i) having enough storage to basically keep all of your emails and never having to delete anything, and ii) not having to worry about folders and organizing because the incredible search would make it easy to find any email easily. I remember thinking how huge the original 1G limit was and how audacious it was to consider that search would trump organization when it came to managing email. Things have changed since that time, including the thinking at Gmail. They have recently come out with some interesting email productivity improvements, most notably Priority Inbox and Smart Labels and Google continues to innovate on the email productivity and overload front.

I am not surprised to see this change and evolution in Gmail’s approach and I expect to see even more in the direction of organization of email over just relying on search. To explain why I’ll use a simple story.

Imagine for a second that you had Harry Potter’s wizard powers. In your kitchen are all your cooking tools, all your ingredients, all your spices, all in one big messy pile called the cooking pile. Don’t worry, you are a wizard, so you need only cast a simple spell and the exact ingredient or cooking utensil you need will instantaneously find itself in your hands, ready to be used. Would you prefer such a situation over a very organized kitchen, with every tool and ingredient in its place and reasonably easy to find within one or two drawer or cupboard checks? When I posed this question to my wife, an engineer and also an avid chef, she really liked the idea of being a wizard, but just couldn’t handle having the messy pile in the kitchen, magic or not.

This makes sense because of our fundamental nature as humans. We mostly prefer order over chaos, we feel more comfortable when things are organized and we like to make connections between things and keep similar items together. For most of us, these rules apply to our email management and email productivity as well. We don’t want to keep all of our emails, we don’t like to see our inboxes full of emails from thousands of different topics and discussions, or useless emails from way in the past. Granted some could live with the pile and the wizard search, but they represent a minority.

When gently pressed further on the cooking pile question, my wife offered this suggestion: I still like that wizard thing, so what if I could get some magic that would get all the cooking utensils and ingredients automatically out of the shopping bags and into the right drawer or cupboard in the kitchen? In fact, it would be even better if the items I tend to use more frequently would automatically be placed closer to where I use them in the kitchen.

Hmm, very interesting, I think she just might be onto something…!

Let me know your thoughts on having your email organized manually or automatically, versus just having a super effective search.