How I handle my mails and tasks

An article by Administrator 3 Kommentare

How are you handling your mails? Are you more the folder-/rules type or do you tag your messages? A combination of both maybe? What is the number of lists you’re getting messages from?

In my ongoing journey through different ideas of self-organization I’ve tried a lot of methods to gain control over my inbox. Some of them worked better than others but most of the time I felt rather lost in my inbox.

I had large folder structures and complicated sorting rules, then I tried to use flags, tags, filters…

Nothing really solved the main problem: I got so many mails that I spent most of my day reading, sorting and answering mails but still had the feeling to miss important information. Or worse: to drop tasks that should have been somewhere in my inbox. My main inbox never went below 50 unread items and I desperately tried to win the mail race…

Until 8 month ago.

That was when I spent some time restructuring my inbox and defined a set of rules that looked like worth trying. My lovely lady (who is generally an extremely well organized project manager) also gave very helpful advice and so I’m finally happy with my self-organization. My inbox is usually empty when I leave the office. Yey!

What works for me might also work for others, so I thought I’d share :-). I’m also eager to hear your tips&tricks: Please let me/us read about them in the comments!

So here is how I’m organizing myself these days:

Step 1 – information diet

The first step is really rather obvious, but nevertheless it was for me one of the hardest.
I always thought that I got more mails than I could possibly consume and by looking at the 30+ mailing lists I was subscribed to I decided that there shouldn’t really be a need for more than 10 lists to be on. I reviewed my folders and rules and discovered that there were quite a lot lists that I was barely able to pay attention to but received the messages nevertheless. I usually sorted them into separate folders and tried to read them every now and then. But the number of unread items was ridiculously high. So I took a deep breadth and unsubscribed from all exept 8 lists. First as an experiment but it proved to be a very healthy exercise for me… I do that every few months since then and I never seem to miss an important information so far. Those usually get distributed via several channels anyway and reach me through one of my remaining subscriptions :-)

Step 2 – Turning off all notifications…

For me this was really an essential step in order to free myself from mail-slavery. It’s actually a known fact that notifications of any sort interrupt the flow of thoughts and cause a context switch that slows down significantly. Turning all notifications off and having outlook running in the background enabled me to check my mail when I’ve finished something instead of handling mails in between and loosing productivity…

Step 3 – only deleted folders are good folders…

The less folders I have the less chance for my email to hide :-)

My folder structure went through several iterations but meanwhile I really use just three folders in my inbox (four if you count in “deleted items :-) :

- Inbox

-- Archive

-- FollowUp

-- unsorted

Step 4 – making sure that I don’t forget action items and follow-up’s

Every mail that is not sent to me directly or with me on CC gets sorted to the “unsorted” folder. The only exception to that rule are mails sent to our team alias as I really want to make sure to read them soon after arrival... I review the unsorted folder every now and then but usually I just quickly glance over it and delete it every other day. If I have time I answer some of the mails in there or read it on my phone…

Every mail in my inbox is an action item. When I’ve read it I might answer it but in any case I decide on its status. There are really just three states a mail can be in:

1. It is something that I can delete => You wouldn’t believe how fast I hit the del key :-)
   It is important to mention that sometimes a simple answer is enough to qualify a mail as “deletable”, so sometimes I hit reply, type in my answer and then I delete the message from my inbox… the mail I’ve just sent is archived in sent items automatically and that’s all I need… BTW: I usually empty the deleted items folder only when my inbox limit warning comes in. This ensured so far that I don’t loose any information by accident…
2. It is something that I need to store for later reference or that contains important information but no further action => This message gets moved to the Archive folder
3. I need to follow up at a later point in time. This state also might be a result from an answer I just typed in. Mails like this belong to my FollowUp-folder. I walk through the items of that particular folder once a day and see if I need to do anything with them. Sometimes I write a follow up message or I just decide to wait another day. Receiving or writing anything in between might change the state of its items to deletable or qualify it for the Archive… My ultimate goal is to have an empty inbox and an empty FollowUp Folder. Thanks to the conversation view in Outlook 2010 I can see in every new arriving email whether it belongs to an item in the archive or in the follow up Folder and act accordingly…

To move items and conversations between those folders (and do some other regular tasks) I defined easy quicksteps (that’s a rule based “macro” that you can define in Outlook 2010 and run with a single click). But a simple drag&drop would work as well… For the follow up folder I also defined a little rule that sorts everything where I put myself on CC in that folder. That basically enables me to put an item in that process in one step instead of first writing a mail and then finding and sorting it.

This structure has several advantages for me:

1. I know exactly where my mails are :-)
2. I know where my action items are (Inbox and FollowUp Folder)
3. I do not need to maintain complicated rules. In fact I could live with just 3 (a general “sort everything” rule and “stop executing rules” rules for mails to me, mails cc’ing me or mails to very important lists that I want to see in the inbox)
4. I safe a ton of time in my daily mail routine that I can use elsewhere…

So that’s it… What do you think? How are you organizing yourself? Would a model like mine work for you as well?