One of the biggest
productivity sinks most of us face is email. From the sheer volume (even
after decent spam-filtering), to the necessity of actually
checking your
spam filter to make sure nothing got stuck in there that you actually need to
deal with, to the temptation to waste even
more time writing a reply, it
sucks up
hours of a typical busy professional's day. How can we
deal with it?!
There are three main ways to deal with pretty much
anything with daunting volume:
First of course you can reduce the volume! Unsubscribe
from any email lists that aren't sufficiently useful, amusing, or whatever
other criteria you apply, to make it worth their contribution to the
load. That's so obvious that I'm going to
assume you've already done that. (Or at least heard of
it, considered it, and procrastinated about it.)
Second, you can just suck it up and attack the problem.
If you've chosen that path, good luck! As you wade through the stupid
jokes from your relatives, the latest sale announcements from your favorite
stores, and other such dreck, your vital business communications are going
unread for too long.
Third, you can be an inbox ninja! No, I don't mean leave
it unseen, I mean to slice and dice it so you can attack it in the most
effective places first. There are many cuts you can make, but the
basic two I like are
direct vs.
list, and
work vs.
not-work. This allows you to separate your email into four
"buckets": work-related email sent directly to you, work-related lists,
non-work email sent directly to you, and non-work lists.
How to apply this strategy, depends on what tools are available
for the program you use to read email. I use GMail, and usually directly
at their web interface. Like most email programs, that lets me do a
search. Pretty much any email program lets you do that.
GMail, however, is particularly powerful in that it will let you do the search
automagically on incoming mail (they call it a "filter"), and use that
to apply any
labels to each piece of email. These let me use a
much simpler search
later to get that "quadrant" of my email.
Let's look at an example. Suppose I'm a
veeblefetzer repairman. Anything mentioning
veebelefetzers or repairing is work-related, along with the various popular
brands of veeblefetzers, such as Furd and Potrzebie. Also, anything from
veebleworld.com (where people may contact me directly, or post in forums, which
will send me an email from the forums subdomain), or from anyone in my company
(backbelt.com), or from the Veeblezebie mailing list, or from Melvin
Cowznofski. I also subscribe to the blues-guitar and skeet-shooter
lists, but these have nothing to do with work, nor do any of my other frequent
correspondents.
(For the sake of simplicity, let's say all the lists are at
Yahoo. Slightly different filtering techniques may be needed for lists
hosted elsewhere, like looking for words from a header, footer, or subject line
preface.)
So, I can set up filters as follows:
- If something fits the search:
veeblefetzers OR repair* OR furd
OR potrzebie OR veebleworld OR backbelt.com OR veeblezebie OR
from:cowznofski@example.com, then tag it with the label
"Work".
- If something fits the search:
from:forums.veebleworld.com OR
to:yahoogroups.com, then tag it with the label "list".
Now suppose I am settling down to my workday, and want to read
the highest priority stuff: work-related emails sent directly to me. I
can search on:
in:inbox label:work -label:list. After I'm done with
that I can search on
in:inbox label:work label:list to get my work
lists. When I get home, I can search on
in:inbox -label:list
-label:work and
in:inbox label:list -label:work. If
I didn't have labels available, I could still achieve the same goal by
combining the two searches. Either way, I could make these searches
easier by saving them as URLs; if you don't use the web to read your email, you
could save them as canned text strings to paste into the search field.
GMail provides a
Quick Links "lab" to make it even
easier.
Alternately, if I were reading my email via a desktop client
program such as Thunderbird, I could set up filters to route the mail into
folders based on the search results.
If your raw searches are large enough to be cumbersome, there
are also
the plus sign trick, and, if you have your own
domain,
catchall addresses. These are ways to create
unique addresses on the fly. (If your email host honors the plus-sign
standard, as Google does, append a plus sign and any other words you want, to
the username part of your GMail address, and it will still get to you.
So, if you're joeshmoe@example.com, and example.com honors this trick, email to
joeshmoe+whatever@example.com will also get to you.) You can use these
generated addresses to subscribe to lists that don't have some visible trace
you can search on, or to separate out work lists, or even separate lists into
ones for ads, announcements, discussions, or even particular topics. I
would sign up for the non-work lists as joeshmoe+lists@example.com, the work
lists as joeshmoe+work+lists@example.com, any other work-related sites as
joeshmoe+work@example.com, and everything else as joeshmoe@example.com.
Then, I could just search for "work" and "lists" as
words in the To line
rather than
labels on the message.
(Or you can look for plus-signed tags in order to apply
labels. You can combine all these tricks however you like.)
In summary:
- Define searches that pick out segments of your email.
- Apply these searches in applicable combinations.
- Save the combinations in some convenient way.
- Attack your email pile by prioritized chunks!
- Having accomplished your mission, leave the email castle, fading
silently into the night.
