Email Bankruptcy
March 6th, 2009, 2:13am by JakeSo today I emptied out my personal (Yahoo!) and work (Notes) email inboxes. I’m getting too many emails, and I find that if I don’t respond to emails quickly, they are lost in the deluge. I have a good filing system, also known as don’t-file-anything-just-use-search, but no good flagging system. For my work stuff, I’m going to strive to actually file and work on an single-screen email protocol; right now, I have about a dozen emails in the Inbox since they are current issues. My question is, how does everyone deal with receiving 10-50 emails a day? Some people love the Gmail, some folks file eveything, some people respond or delete. But what will work for me?
Yahoo! Mail might be hopeless, but probably not– there must be a good solution. As for my work / Lotus Notes, is there a better option than filing? Does anyone use email filters, or tagging systems, or segregated inboxes? Kelvin & I had a little Twitter back & forth about this earlier.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:54 am
Start by checking out Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” — I use those ideas in Entourage for my work email. The basic idea — all incoming mail is tagged “to process,” and I process it by figuring out what to do with it — some action, an email response, etc. After processing it, which usually means getting it into my GTD system, I untag the mail and either trash the mail or save it to one mailbox. That mailbox has the most recent 3 months of saved mail, and at the beginning of every month, I archive the oldest month. The “process” queue is what you work out of, and try to keep it at zero. The key is to remember that your email box is not your to-do list.
This would be easy to implement with gmail labels, not sure about Y! Mail.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Inbox zero? More like Inbox 500 for my personal mail and Inbox 3000 for my work email. Yeah, I probably need a better system myself.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
So I have turned on IMAP on the Centro for Yahoo! Mail, but I can’t get it to work with Mac OS X Mail even when using the same settings. I imagine this is by Yahoo!’s design, but does anyone know if there’s a workaround? I saw one solution, but it involves turning over my Yahoo! password to a 3rd-party service, which I’m not comfortable doing. Suggestions?
March 8th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
No idea, Jake. I’m not sure Yahoo has even publically admitted that IMAP is available for their Mail service. I only use it with POP3 (on my phone and my laptop).
March 8th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Forward all your mail to gmail and use IMAP there, if you’re really desparate for a solution, should work fine. If IMAP isn’t officially supported by yahoo, don’t know what to tell you.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Forward all your mail to gmail and use IMAP there, if you’re really desparate for a solution, should work fine. If IMAP isn’t officially supported by yahoo, don’t know what to tell you.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Jake, I used to leave things in my Notes inbox indefinitely, but it gets hard to deal with. I’ve tried the many-folder approach but I get lazy.
So now I have a poor-man’s solution (poor-woman’s solution?). If I don’t need to do anything with the email (like reply), I drag it to another folder called “archive” which is really just another inbox that I search when I need to.
That way my inbox is only the things I need to act on. Usually I drag things over immediately after reading them.