E-mail is something hellish. It makes us lose a lot of time when not properly managed, and if you sum up the fact that most people (still) don’t know how to use it in a civilized way, you have that ugly picture we all know about — 10829 unread messages in our Inbox.
Throughout the years, I’ve been refining my e-mail management policies and I think now it’s sort of optimal for my use. Here are some tips to help you diminish the impact of e-mail in your productivity.
- Filters are key: simple fact, if you don’t use filters, you are not thinking straight. It’s simply impossible to manage e-mail if you have one billion messages in your inbox. And if you use filters, you have to ensure you’re doing it intelligently. See the following rules. Oh, and don’t forget to set up all your filters on the server side. This way, if something apocalyptic happens to your workstation, you don’t have to redo everything again.
- Whitelist your most important contacts: spam filters or even your programmed filters might make something important not show up in your inbox, so make sure the contacts that are really important never get filtered.
- Blacklist spammers: I don’t really need to explain this. If the sender is someone you have never seen in your life, block him/her.
- Filter mailing lists: have each of your mailing list messages into their own folders. Chances are that you will never need to read them anyway. Just make a quick eye pass everyday on each folder to ensure you haven’t missed any important topics.
- Filter notification messages: you know, those automatic messages reminding you to renew your password, or some company broadcast, and anything like that. Those should also be filtered and delivered to folders. To keep things organized, create different folders for each priority — for instance, a quarterly report from my CEO is more important than some random department party broadcast. In fact, if you get too many irrelevant broadcast messages, spam filter them.
- Spam filter annoying people: if someone sends you more garbage than useful messages, spam filter them. If it’s really important, they’ll reach you anyway.
- Calendar events should never be filtered: I don’t really need to explain why, right?
- Flag messages: if you don’t have time to reply something, flag it so you don’t forget to do it later. You will be amazed on how annoying that ‘Flagged’ folder looks in your sidebar.
- Archive responded messages: after you reply to an important message, archive it in a folder. Create as many folders as you need for this. Just make sure you don’t mix up filtering folders with archive folders to keep things organized. If it is not important, then delete the message. You don’t pile up garbage at your home, so why should you do it digitally?
- Avoid e-mail whenever you can: long e-mail threads can be tedious and take too long. If something is not solved in half a dozen e-mails at most, schedule a meeting, call the person, do whatever is more effective than e-mail.
If you are a Mac user, here are more tips:
- Use Smart Mailboxes: this is one of the best features in Apple Mail. You may create a virtual inbox which shows you only the messages that match a certain number of rules. It’s an easy way to create priority inboxes without filters and it also works for keeping track of the archives.
- Search is a great ally: Apple Mail has a search tool that actually works and is easy to use (i.e. doesn’t require you to learn cryptic labels to find what you want). Type part of a name, select the person you want from the list and select which field of the message you want to search for that person; then type a word or a phrase and select if you want to search subjects, message bodies or attachment names. And you’re all set. It’s a search engine actual human beings can use.
- If you’re serious about productivity, you should use OmniFocus: it’s a great 3rd party GTD software which integrates to Mail and allows you to convert messages into To Do list items automagically — very handy!