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Empty Inbox?
Cindy Chick has an interesting post on email management and the art of getting things done. She’s included some great tips like this one:
“If you keep all your archives in your inbox, note that you can push the current actions folders to the top by simply putting an asterisk in front of the name. I use this same technique in my pending projects folder to push the projects I’m actively working on to the top.”
Another tip Cindy mentions, the use of current projects folders, is one I try to adhere to. However, when things get really crazy, my inbox tends to revert right back to being my ‘to do’ list. I just can’t seem to get away from it.
Any more tips from Slawsters?
I fear there’s no set of tips that can make things easier for me; only sheer will and persistence get me through my inbox. When I had more there than I have now, so to speak, I would find that tackling things early in the morning worked for me. Also hitting “reply” right away rather than putting it off till… whenever. But you see how these are just personal behaviours rather than tech tips.
If I put things in folders before I’ve dealt with them, they disappear forever. So my inbox is my nag list, and I wouldn’t want to change that.
Again a behaviour: if I can’t give an email the attention it deserves right away, I tend to reply to the writer to acknowledge receipt and promise a full response. That tends to keep them at bay for a day or two.
I am struggling with my email box right now. An edict went out from tech services to clear out our boxes as much as possible before they do some work on the network this weekend. So, I have been sorting and resorting, sifting and resifting, deleting from people whose names I don’t recognize or whose conversations aren’t urgent. I have managed to get it down to half, but still there are too many here.
Yesterday I tried to delete every message that came in once I had dealt with it, otherwise I had to print it or file it. I still have 30 messages left, items that I would like to keep for informational purposes but which aren’t important enough to print and add to the paper burden in an overflowing office. *Sigh*. I’m not sure how to reduce the load.
One small step: my husband and I have been instant messaging each other instead of exchanging email when we have quick conversations. A lot less to go back and delete later. I would like to get friends using IM as well for casual conversations for the same reason. It just makes more sense.
What ever happened to the paperless office reducing workload anyhow? The inbox is the plague of the OTs (i.e. 20 ot 6 etc.) I just spent some time this morning trying to wrestle mine down to size. One thing I have done is create a “To Do” folder for those messages that I really want to take a look at but cannot at the present, the ones that are interesting but not urgent. Yes often messages go there to die, but occasionally I am able to go to this folder and look at a few, or I remember that I placed a topical item there. I must admit that it is a liberating feeling to delete a lot of email at once though. As for folders I try to move messages along to projects I am working on so that I can work on them from one place without having to sort through all of the other messages that flow in. So right now I have folders for various webpages, federated searching, serials etc. That being said, my inbox is still bulging at the seams.
As for IM, I found that when you get too many contacts, it is too distracting to try and get work done. So I have moved away from using it. Has anyone tried Google chat?
If somone comes up with the magic bullet for controlling email please, please post it to the list.
Here’s a question though, how long can you go without checking your email, say when you are on vacation? I used to be a slave to my email when on vacation but last year, I ignored it almost completely and felt like a new person. Now when I have days off, I do my best to ignore it.
Not being plugged in sometimes, is a good thing.
I’m curious about what people get in their inboxes. I’ve pushed as much routine stuff as I can — lists, groups — into RSS, so that email is personal, in the sense that it’s aimed at me as a person, whether business or friend. I find I can ignore my RSS feeds a whole lot better than I can my email, and so some things languish quite happily for a while. Also, having organized my feeds into groups means I have a decent incoming filing system.
Which reminds me: do you make any use of filters for incoming mail? If not, why not?
I will confess to using the “Fodden Method” of email control – all in the inbox. I use Google Desktop to retrieve emails if I need to get them again. Works pretty well on the whole.
Simon, how do you route lists into RSS?? That might help me somewhat. If I am just lurking on a list I try to sign up for the daily summary rather than each individual message.
I’m not sure what filtering would do for me (other than the wonderful filtering out of spam). I’m a visual learner and if something goes directly in a file, I would never think to open the file and read through it. I can’t get it to work 100% on Outlook, anyway. I used to be a master at Groupwise rules and could do a lot more with that, having it perform the actions of rerouting things to people automatically that I otherwise would be doing manually. Right now I do sort things I have read extensively into files however for future reference, and that works well.
Regarding Mark’s comment about leaving email alone, I do find if I am off sick and not checking email, I receive a lot fewer messages. Apparently I generate a lot of this myself by sending others email. I try to learn from that lesson and try to reduce how much I email others.
More than a couple days away, however, and my box is overflowing. Our office policy is either to have an absence rule on the email, or have someone checking email for us. I hate to put an absence rule on because of all the lists I am on, and because I don’t want to reply to spammers. Also it is a burden to ask a co-worker to deal with my inbox in addition to her own. So, as a result I take the blackberry and/or laptop with me if I go away. Sigh. Do others use absence reply rules??
Connie, the simplest way to get your email via RSS would be to forward a list, for example, to a Gmail account and then put in your new reader https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom You’ll be asked for an ID and password — at least my feed reader asks, which makes sense.
You could forward all your lists to one Gmail account or you could set up a separate Gmail account for each list.
You might also encourage list managers to move their lists to a system that produces its own RSS feeds, too.
Well I’ll be damned. Simon – this is a great tip – I did not know you could do this with Gmail – email via RSS!! Combined with Feedburner and FeedBLITZ, you would get a very nifty List 2.0 service… Thanks!!
Cool. I’ll have to try to get Gmail working. I had a difficult time with it because it didn’t like the security settings on my computer, and I had it on the lowest security setting!
Simon – do you know how to get full text feed with this? I’m only getting very short teasers – the first line of each email… :-(
I’ll have a look, Patrick (it’s not something I make use of myself), and get back to you.
Patrick, I’ve taken another look and this is what I’ve discovered:
1. It seems the Gmail-to-RSS feed does only deliver a headline. It means that it’s useful (only) for telling you you’ve got mail.
2. If that’s okay, you might want to take advantage of these tips:
a. you can put your username and password right into the feed address thus: https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
b. if you filter your gmail and apply labels to the filtered mail you can get a feed of whichever labelled mail you want by putting that in the feed URL too thus: https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/jobs/ (where ‘jobs’ is the label e.g.) Of course you can combine these tips.
3. Take a look at http://unentangled.net/blog/2006/02/28/email-to-rss/ where this is explained a bit more and where there are helpful comments.
4. One of the commenters pointed out a service http://mail2rss.org/ that probably does what you and Connie might want, though it has some drawbacks for some people (see the comments in the above URL).
5. Finally, one of the commenters said, simply: “I forward e-mails to a Google Group that I created, and every Google Group has its own feed.” I think this might be the winner, though I haven’t tested it.
Let us know how you fare. And sorry for sending you and Connie up a blind alley.
Thank you Simon. I will investigate further and try to develop a viable alternative (no one line teaser) and report back my findings – thanks for the great starting points!
Cheers
Patrick
http://claimid.com/patrick-cormier