My brother sold me on the 'keep one folder' trick, now I can't find anything

He swore deleting all my subfolders into a single 'Inbox' would speed things up, but after 2 weeks I've missed two bill payments because the important stuff is buried under 400 newsletters, so has anyone else tried this and had to rebuild their system from scratch?

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1 Comment

brooke7671mo ago

I saw a productivity guy on YouTube swear by this exact method, said it was like clearing your mental cache or something. He made it sound so clean and simple, but then he showed his own screen and it was just a wall of unread emails, so I knew it was hype. The thing is, newsletters are the worst because they pile up silently, and your brain stops seeing the folder as important when everything is lumped together. I had a mini version of this where I put all my work docs in one folder for a month, and I missed a deadline because the file was sitting between two "funny cat" PDFs. You probably need to just rebuild, but do it slow this time, maybe three folders max, like Bills, Personal, and Work. Also turn off the newsletter subscriptions you never open, that alone cuts like 80 percent of the noise. It took me a weekend to get back on track, but at least now I know that "simple" doesn't always mean "smart".