On Email Organization
April 22, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
For the last month or so I’ve been on a rampage, an email 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 email addresses, Gmail and my @jonathancoffman.com mail. 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 email 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 email is handled by GoogleApps (which I love by the way), so for now I have two identical but disconnected sets of tags.
My Current tag structure looks like this:
- Account and Login Information
- Banking
- Bills
- Blog Conversations
- Contributr
- Current Projects
- Pipeline Projects
- Coupons and Discounts
- Job Hunting
- Journalism School
- Newsletters
- Personal (family)
- Private Betas
- Product Orders
- Service Orders
- Require followup
- Servers and Hosting
- Social Media
- Travel
- URGENT
So as you can see I have a blend of informational, topical, and timeline based tags for my email. 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 organization is that I find myself less stressed when I get a new message. I triage it as soon as it comes in, then reply, tag, 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 email 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).
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