An article flew by yesterday that highlights e-mail folders as a waste of time. This is the philosophy behind the GMail inbox.

Filing email in folders is a waste of timeIf you file your emails into folders in your email program you’re wasting your time, according to a study by IBM Research. The 345-user study found that people who used the search function in their email program could find relevant emails as easily as those who had categorised each email into folders.

Finding emails by searches took on average 17 seconds, versus 58 seconds finding the emails by folder. The likelihood of success – that is, finding the intended email – was no greater when it had been filed in a folder.