On Email Organization

April 22, 2008 by Jonathan 

For the last month or so I’ve been on a rampage, an rampage. I haven’t quite hit Inbox Zero but inbox 30-40 suits me well actually. Here’s what I’ve done:

  • I now have only 2 visible addresses, Gmail and my @jonathancoffman.com . Those other addresses (.Mac, Yahoo!, Mizzou, and my secondary Gmail) all now get picked up by my primary Gmail account, this way I only have two inboxes to check, and hopefully by responding to those with only one address I gradually get fewer and fewer messages going to those other addys.
  • Combining the last two addresses, my primary gmail and my domain isn’t yet feasible. I can’t quite take myself down to that level yet. Because they’re used for two very different purposes (personal and professional) the use cases will remain mutually exclusive for the time being.
  • The downside to still having two inboxes: two sets of gmail tags/folders. My domain is handled by GoogleApps (which I by the way), so for now I have two identical but disconnected sets of tags.
My Current structure looks like this:
  • Account and Login Information
  • Banking
  • Bills
  • Contributr
  • Current Projects
  • Pipeline Projects
  • Coupons and Discounts
  • Hunting
  • School
  • Newsletters
  • Personal (family)
  • Private Betas
  • Product Orders
  • Service Orders
  • Require followup
  • and Hosting
  • Social
  • Travel
  • URGENT
So as you can see I have a blend of informational, topical, and timeline based tags for my . One of my goals is to set more auto-tagging rules for items to be placed where they belong. Right now I practice the art of triage in my inbox and sift and sort from there.
One glorious effect of this is that I find myself less stressed when I get a new . I triage it as soon as it comes in, then reply, , or archive as time goes on. 
I continue to be constantly connected in multiple ways and I don’t see myself moving from Inbox 30-40 to Inbox 0 anytime soon. Nor do I see myself cutting back on usage to the point of only checking and responding a couple of times a day. I’m quite happy with my current schedule of approximately every 15 minutes (the minimum on my iPhone). 
Something else I’ve noticed is that I don’t start up on my nearly as often as I used to. I almost exclusively use my iPhone to check and reply to emails. That is unless I need to send files or attachments since it’s not currently possible to do so on the iPhone.

Possibly Related posts:

  1. Writing More Effective Email (via ChrisBrogan.com)
  2. The iPhone For Business
  3. Personal Branding Knowledge Is Still Just Beginning…
  4. Are Podcasts Dead?
  5. Crossing The Skills Divide

Filed under: Blog, Personal Development and Branding
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Comments

One Response to “On Email Organization”

  1. Sam Sherlock on May 16th, 2008 6:22 pm

    [quote]Combining the last two addresses, my primary gmail and my domain email isn’t yet feasible. [/quote]

    AFAIK you can use gmail to manage other pop3 accounts

    in gmail under accounts click add another account

    and you get a popup with:

    Add a mail account
    Enter the email address of the account to get mail from
    (Note: You may add 5 more accounts)

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