This is only sorta-kinda related, but I’ve recently started trying to organize my email. A couple of weeks ago, I had about 22,000 emails in three inboxes. I am a neat freak by nature, so I decided to try for InboxZero. In a nutshell, the point of InboxZero is to take control of your email so you don’t waste time slogging through it and you don’t lose tasks in the depths of the inbox. Personally, I’ve more than once forgotten to get back to somebody or complete a task simply because it got buried in my inbox. It was time for a change.
This first took some serious email shuffling. I moved all my old archives onto my mac, and painstakingly went through all my newer email to either (1) trash (2) filed or (3) ??? (<= The “Still-active-but-nothing-to-do-right-now-pile”. I flagged those.)
Once that was done, I had what *looked* like InboxZero, but it would not be able to stay that way without a new system. So, I went about trying to devise one.
My complicating factors:
1- I have a mac, an iPad, and an iPhone. They are all mac based, which is nice, but the software available for each isn’t the same. For instance, I’m a huge fan of fantastical on iPhone and mac, but alas there is no iPad version as of yet. For email, it’s even worse. Sparrow has been discontinued. No other third-party client is up to par, or at least not yet. So I’m stuck with Mail. Problem: iOS and OSX versions aren’t the same.
2- Much as I would love to, it is unrealistic for me to use gmail for the majority of my email needs. Students and colleagues send to – and expect emails from – a UMW email address. My own personal .Mac MobileMe iCloud email remains unchanged for over a decade, and I’ve been unwilling to do anything about it in order to be easier to reach. So I have to stay with the three major inboxes.
My solution has been to create a multi-step system, as simple as I could make it:
– Have a web archive for my personal email, and another one for gmail
– Have TWO web archives for UMW mail: hold and filed. Hold keeps all the emails that are unresolved. Filed has everything else.
– Use the flagging feature to mark important emails. There are multi colored flags available, so I have a couple different colors for “work”, “not work”, etc.
The end result is that an email is immediately moved to another box as it’s received. If it’s important, it will get a flag. Either way, it will be moved to the “hold” or “filed” box. Every morning, I check the flagged emails and respond to those I can respond to. Once a week or so, I go through the “hold” box and move emails as needed to “filed” or to the trash.
So now on my mac my inbox looks like this:
There’s only one problem with this system for me at this point: iOS allows for flagging, but only in one color, and only “sees” flagged emails in the inbox. So that means some tasks need to be done either on my mac or on webmail *shudder*.
If only that were resolved, I’d be good to go.
In the meantime, I’m still gonna keep my InboxZero initiative going. One thing I’ve noticed: no one has had to wait in vain for an email/task from me since I started.
Actually, Tim, I think your InboxTwenty is pretty much identical to my InboxZero: I have a “hold” box that has one to two doz emails in it at any given time. So in my eyes, your effort is a SUCCESS!
I did an inbox zero type thing a few weeks ago. I know this now because I’m noticing a few bills that went unpaid because of it. Lesson learned: If I attempt to make stars in Gmail my new “todo” list, I have to not only keep it up more than 2 days, I have to go back and look at all those emails I cleaned up by starring and archiving. For now I think I’m ok with Inbox Twenty.
Okay. I want to make sure I understand this.
You sorted through 22 THOUSAND emails?! And got to InboxZero?
I. . .don’t even know where to start with how impressive this is.
My version of InboxZero is to go into my inbox, select everything that’s older than a month old and create a new folder called “Archive XXX-XXX” (where the X’s are the date range of what I’m moving).
Then I sort through the remaining messages (from the past month) which is manageable. When I’m done, I pat myself on the back and go have a beer. 🙂
Thanks, Martha!
Yes, it took some effort, but at least for now it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I know what I have to do and stuff doesn’t fall through the cracks.
I just wish the software were better adapted for this way of managing email. It would make this kind of endeavor less involved.