I always liked Keynes’s view that it would be splendid if “economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists”. Time, then, to apply the power of microeconomic analysis to the important practical task of getting your email under control.
Step one: take advantage of free disposal. Simple textbook economic problems assume that you can never have too much of a good thing – at worst, you can always throw away the stuff you don’t want. We economists call this the assumption of “free disposal”. Of course, free disposal does not apply if you’re talking about visiting relatives, a tatty sofa or a breeding population of yoghurt pots at the back of the fridge. It is remarkably easy, however, to get rid of email: all that is needed is the “will to delete” – ideally the deletion should be swift and without remorse.
Step two: take a data-driven approach. A long-running question is whether you should organise your email into folders or not. Over the past couple of decades, our computer filing systems have trained us to think in terms of folders, but an alternative is to find old email by searching for it – or even just scroll through a big fat unsorted inbox. Steve Whittaker, a computer scientist at IBM Research, with four colleagues, has conducted a study to figure out the effectiveness of these different approaches. It’s called “Am I wasting my time organising email?” and the conclusion is “yes, you are”.