I finally beat my inbox into submission and got back into that state of flow where, as per the GTD principles, my inbox is just a landing pad for items that I can file accordingly.
In the past, I tried doing this with a series of @Review, @Today, etc folders in Thunderbird, but I found that I wasn’t particularly good at remembering to look in those folders on a regular basis. The inbox is simply burned into my brain as the be all and end all of folders in my mail program, with everything else delegated as archival.
The solution (which seems to be working so far) is to use Backpack for my @… folders. I just forward the mails to my Backpack account (each page in Backpack has its own email address) and include a brief mention of where I filed the email in case I need the original again. Just like how I put work stuff into a FogBugz system, it’s like filing the messages to a to do list that I can check on later, but the big deal, for me, anyway, is that the work items are as far from the email program as I can get them. This leaves my email system to serve the two functions it does well - accept and archive.
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