E-mail Organization
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- Gucci
I'm curious to hear what kind of tactics you busy bastards employ to keep your unruly inboxes organized.
I find I'm getting more e-mails lately than I can comfortably keep up with and though I use rules to shoot them into individual folders, they're getting lost.
- omg0
zero inbox
- Amicus0
At previous jobs there were Empty Inbox policies, but at my new job everything stays in the inbox.
If you've read it, but want to take action later just Mark as Unread.
If it's ultra important Flag It.
Good searches take care of everything at least well as folders do, and normally they are faster.
At least, that is the theory, but when no one else sticks to putting job numbers in emails it's a little harder the exact email... the updated Mail app in Lion might fix that with the email threads.
- btw - this is not how I would run the show, but it saves you missing anything that gets shot into a folder and at least you notice it immediately.Amicus
- oddslob0
Things for mac has this dope quickentry shortcut that basically posts a link to the Email into the notes field of a todo item. So if shit hits my inbox, I make a todo item out of it, even if it's 'respond' and then i file the email immediately into one bigass 'archives' folder. The goal is to get my email inbox down to nothing just for OCD reasons, but the other goal is to get it into things where I can actually assign it to someone specifically or assign it to a specific day that it needs to be dealt with, or move it into a project folder so it becomes part of the flow. Once it's out my email and in things, i have way more control over who/how/when shit gets dealt with, so i can just carry on with my day doing my daily todo items or else deal with it immediately if its top priority.
That way, too, the completed todo items (emails and not emails) can be quickly scanned at the end of the day and i may have missed tracking the time on a small task or something so ill be reminded by seeing that I dealt with that email, hence the small task and can make sure it gets tracked and ultimately billed accordingly.
- Gucci0
Thanks oddslob, that actually sounds pretty interesting. I'm trying to use 'tasks' in Outlook 2011 to do something similar, but it's not as smooth as that sounds.
- popfodders0
I don't
- spot130
Just switch your domain to Google Apps, I don't organize anything anymore because the search works perfectly.