Power Up Your Inbox - Or, Zero it Down

I am not going to get into the annals of email issues. Let me just say that I identify myself as an "organized person" and yet I have been having, for the longest years, a real problem keeping up with email. Usually it goes like this: email comes in, I read it. By the time I feel like I have time to respond to it, so many more emails arrived in my inbox that it will take some time to find that one I want to respond to. In the process of searching, I come across many others that I've forgotten about, causing not only a delay in the activity but a major feeling of failure. At this point, I have to decide if the original email I wanted to respond to is still the most important. More time and agony is spent. The 'respond to email" activity is at this point too much to handle, and abandoned for some other time because now I need to do something else.

Some tips will be for Apple Mail only, but for sure you can find a Windows or Linux alternative.

Ready?

Step 1/3: One Folder

Create an "Archive" folder. In it goes all email that is NOT trash. You know, all of those you might someday read/respond to. The goal here is to get important messages out of view so they don't become an impediment to future email processing. It's a pretty easy binary decision. Anything else goes to trash. A nice side effect that I observed in my implementation of this system is that it became super easy to identify many subscriptions that I was sending to trash immediately. And because there were so few emails there to process, I could afford to take the second or two to unsubscribe from those. This created a snow ball effect where I kept getting each time less irrelevant email (even if they were relevant in the past).

For this to work better, here is a trick: use Mail Act-On (http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html) a free and open source program for the Mac. It will let you easily setup shortcuts to expedite moving mail around, or marking them anyway you wish. See how I setup my rule below to move any selected message to the Archive folder (ctrl m):

Step 2/3: Smart Mailboxes

Setup Smart Mailboxes to filter the important emails from your Archive folder. Obviously, you won't end up with Smart Mailboxes to catch all messages, only the most important ones that have a higher potential that you will be going back to, like emails related to a project you are working on, or from a recent acquaintance you are exchanging with. The other ones will still be accessible via a search or by going directly to the Archive folder. This post describes the idea really well, and was what got me motivated: Stop creating those folders.

If you need ideas for Smart Mailboxes: Some handy Smart Mailboxes.

Step 3/3: Tips, Shortcuts and Other Utils

For higher productivity, my email messages are only downloaded manually. But when I want to download them, I want to do it fast. On to the next tip.

If your mail application doesn't provide all the shortcuts you need, create them yourself. If you are an Apple Mail user, this is a must. This site has instructions: Make your own Apple Mail shortcuts. Below are my own:

Warning: I keep having a problem making this work. After I create the shortcuts and reopen Mail, the shortcut works. Then, it stops working. If you made it work for yourself please drop me a line.

From here on, you can use the tools I have already covered (Act-On + Smart Mailboxes) to fine tune new views and actions according to what you need. One other tool that I have been using and loving is MailTags. It costs $30 but for me it's worth it. For example, my "_To Respond To" Smart Mailbox contains only messages that I have tagged "respond".

For the real heavy desktop email user, you might want to check out Mail Template. If you do, please let me know how it helped you, I'll be interested.