Email coping mechanisms
Jul. 27th, 2007 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kickahaOkay, so now that my Inbox hit 2600 unsorted msgs today, dating back to January 2006 (that's before we moved up here, note), I decided to roll up my sleeves and take care of this crap. I've been deleting like a madman - I have trashed *SO MANY* stupid jokes sent by family members. I've moved all pics sent by friends and family that were, like, actual pictures and not ZOMG! LOOK AT THIS! images to iPhoto, properly tagged and bagged. I'm down to 1400msgs or so, and still culling.
Now... what to do with them when I'm done? Traditionally, I've meticulously sorted them into folders (I have about, oh... 90 or so, all nicely hierarchical and organized), but a) this is a pain, b) this cuts up conversations among many people into a plethora of snippets in different folders (which I hate). But, the alternative has always been to just... lump them. And that seems like such a nightmare. I've been doing it this way since 1990 or so, and I have a basically complete record of all non-trivial, non-spam email since 1992. (Yeah, scary huh? It's interesting to use it as an ad hoc diary of sorts, to go back and reread conversations with friends then and now, to see my own words and thoughts, and how they've changed... it's kind of terrifying, yet neat.)
Was watching Merlin Mann's inboxzero talk at Google though, and he suggests exactly that: one, and exactly one, folder for all email worth saving, named 'Archive'. Once I was able to get my intestines to stop spasming at the idea, he had a good point... we have these little things called 'search' and 'metadata'... so why not use them?
I realized he is, as he often is, quite spot on. Why should I put *any* work into organizing my mail, when I can search through thousands upon thousands of messages generally faster than I can manually look for what I want? When I use search *anyway* to look for things, why do I have it set up to artificially limit where I'm searching?
So what're y'all's coping mechanisms?
Now... what to do with them when I'm done? Traditionally, I've meticulously sorted them into folders (I have about, oh... 90 or so, all nicely hierarchical and organized), but a) this is a pain, b) this cuts up conversations among many people into a plethora of snippets in different folders (which I hate). But, the alternative has always been to just... lump them. And that seems like such a nightmare. I've been doing it this way since 1990 or so, and I have a basically complete record of all non-trivial, non-spam email since 1992. (Yeah, scary huh? It's interesting to use it as an ad hoc diary of sorts, to go back and reread conversations with friends then and now, to see my own words and thoughts, and how they've changed... it's kind of terrifying, yet neat.)
Was watching Merlin Mann's inboxzero talk at Google though, and he suggests exactly that: one, and exactly one, folder for all email worth saving, named 'Archive'. Once I was able to get my intestines to stop spasming at the idea, he had a good point... we have these little things called 'search' and 'metadata'... so why not use them?
I realized he is, as he often is, quite spot on. Why should I put *any* work into organizing my mail, when I can search through thousands upon thousands of messages generally faster than I can manually look for what I want? When I use search *anyway* to look for things, why do I have it set up to artificially limit where I'm searching?
So what're y'all's coping mechanisms?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty
Date: 2007-07-28 03:42 am (UTC)Merlin Mann is dead on. I have one email archive for each of my inboxes (a Personal Archive for my personal account and a Work Archive for my work email).
Everytime I open Mail.app, I open my inboxes and look at whats in them. I use the email threading feature in Mail.app, so threads collapse together. This means I typically have a few tens of items (as threads are collapsed). I do a quick scan through, reply to the fast ones, send the rest that need action to iGTD by hitting F5, and then use Mail-Act-On so that Cmd-A Ctrl-A sends everything in my inbox to the correct Archive folder (I've bound Ctrl-A to the Mail-Act-On rule that sends all selected email to the correct Archive folder). Bim bam boom.
When I need to find something, I use Spotlight in Mail.app. It's just that simple.
My advice to you is simple: declare email bankruptcy. Create an Archive folder, move all your existing email from your Inbox to your Archive folder. Forget about it. No matter what you may think, you will discover 99% of all email that's been in your inbox more than 24 hours does not really need to be acted on (although it may need to be refered to later).
Re: My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty
Date: 2007-07-28 03:43 am (UTC)Re: My inbox is empty. My inbox is almost *always* empty
Date: 2007-07-28 04:05 am (UTC)I now have three messages that I need to attend to, and I'll send those to OmniFocus as new items, then move them to the Archive as well. Keen.
Experimenting with Smart Folders, metadata, etc, to see what works best for common searches and use patterns.