David.R.Gilson

How to become an e-mail ninja – Part 3

Nov 17

How-To Guides David 1 Comment
e-mail, imap, inbox zero, lifehacking, merlin mann, microsoft, mozilla, online life, outlook, pop, productivity, thunderbird

Approximate reading time is 2 minutes

Okay this is due to a Google video I watched of a talk given by Merlin Mann, about “Inbox Zero (Google video)” (which I’ll show you at the end of this series), you can download the audio here (MP3 59Minutes 40MB). I’m not going to rehash the whole talk, but listening to this really changed the way I have looked at e-mail. (He talks a lot more about time management than I do).

In short, if your Inbox (work or home) is just a wall of messages that makes you weep as you roll the scroll wheel, then you are handling your e-mail in the wrong way. Also you can go the other way, and really spend way too much time organising and have a filing system that is way too heavy to live with. I have swung to both of these extremes in my time.

If you’re a lazy e-mail person, and you’ve got that wall of messages in your Inbox, then for the sake of liberating your time and energy you goal is to get that e-mail Inbox down to zero, yes that’s right, zero e-mail in your Inbox.

First off, there is so much e-mail you can just delete. Those mailing lists you’re on, those silly conversations you had that read more like text messages. You really don’t need to know what someone had for dinner last year, or what was the latest news on your favourite site last week. You just don’t need it.

What Merlin preaches is to learn to regularly process your e-mail rather then just checking it, and to then actually check your e-mail less.
“Don’t live in your e-mail.”

Give yourself little actions, “verbs”, for what needs to be done with an e-mail. You can watch/listen to the talk to see his actions, although here’s my current version. From my Inbox messages get the following treatment:

• Immediate reply and file into my archive.
• Delayed reply, gets put into my “Unreplied” folder.
• Is required for reference in an ongoing task, gets filed in my “Projects” folder.
• No action required, but information is needed for future, gets put into my archive.
• Just delete.

Now the archive is a tricky one. Merlin Mann says that, to him, the archive is just one folder that everything goes into. When giving this talk to Google employees at their campus he said “C’mon you’re Google, you’ve got the frickin’ Gmail, just search”. My old way of archiving had an insane amount of folders and sub-folder levels. After initially listening to Merlin’s talk, I did reduce my folders, but I was still addicted to thinking in folders. Soon, I got down to only five folders and no sub-folders. Eventually, I realised that I was rarely wanting to pull anything from my archive. In which case, it became clear that using search was probably more worthwhile. Therefore, I finally gave up my folders and just dumped everything into one huge archive folder. If you are as addicted to using folders as I used to be, I hope this anecdote encourages you to change.

Conclusion

So boys and girls, this has been the story of how I became an e-mail ninja. I can now access my mail any place any where any time. I am not tied to (or at the mercy of) one specific e-mail service or computer Operating System, and I am not in dire straights if I am without an Internet connection for a while. Most importantly, I am no longer weighed down by year-old messages in my Inbox.

I’m free and I’m staying that way

Inbox Zero Tech Talk

<< Part Two