Am I the only Gmail user who never archives aything? My Inbox has every email I've ever received in it.
Why? because it means I don't feel the stress of having to zero something out. Sure, the more unread stuff I see, the more I know I'm backlogged...but I find it handy to see recent emails toward the top... and that's what leaving everything in the inbox does for me.
I admit when things get crazy at work, Priority Inbox works well for my system.
You're not alone I have seen several friend's inboxes and this appears to be the common usage pattern. These same friends also tend to be very slow to respond and they often just wait until we talk inperson. In class I've also seen other students with inboxes full of unread email. My sister does not unsubscribe from spam newsletters which she instead ignores.
Overall I doubt any good comes from these loose email practices. I may have acquired business style email use earlier in life from the freelancing so I may not be considering their situation.
When an email comes in I never leave it over a day to respond. Just two days ago I got into a real-time email conversation with someone trying to compile my open source project. I invited him unto gtalk and solved the compilation issue in <5 minutes. Had I taken longer to respond he would have gotten bored long before he could become a potential contributor.
People not responding in time doesn't have to do with how they read their mail but only with how they prioritize their life. You consider mail important ,they probably not as much.
I follow the same "full inbox" approach and answer quite fast to mails, in part because i do have email notifications everwhere. I do answer mails with a certain importance at once and keep others on unread or starred.
I know people that archive all mails and do respond slow in general and people that respond fast.
I never archive on my personal Gmail account. Right now I have ~16K read emails, completely unstructured. But it doesn't matter too much because emails I get there rarely need responding to, and I normally get around 5-6 emails a day to that address so I can read them all easily.
My work account however is organised into folders, I normally just leave items as unread until I've replied or am finished with them, then they're archived into folders.
Why? because it means I don't feel the stress of having to zero something out. Sure, the more unread stuff I see, the more I know I'm backlogged...but I find it handy to see recent emails toward the top... and that's what leaving everything in the inbox does for me.
I admit when things get crazy at work, Priority Inbox works well for my system.