Email Productivity

In reading some books on personal productivity, one key element on which they all seem to agree is that it is extremely important to make an immediate decision on an email. Is there some action required? Should I delete it? Should it be stored? Those questions should be answered immediately, and appropriate steps taken to move that message to a useful place (tips will follow).

Similarly, I've started making sure that I, to the best of my ability, receive only the emails I truly want and need. I must admit that I became a newsletter addict, subscribing to email newsletters on a variety of different topics of interest just so I could stay informed. However, I found that I rarely had the time or the inclination to read many of these. Hence, I cancelled my subscriptions and no longer have my inbox filled with these extra messages.

For personal email, I have found that Gmail is far superior to Yahoo! Mail. There are two key reasons for this. First, Gmail allows you to easily group messages by conversation instead of the traditional single message view, using a unique tab system to keep all messages in a conversation connected. In fairness, the newest version of Yahoo! Mail does have the conversation mode available, but I find it to be more difficult to use than Gmail. Secondly, Gmail allows users to tag their mail with the use of labels.

At first I wasn't sure of how tags and labels (in this case the terms are interchangeable since they work the same way) would be useful for me. However, Jack at Icthus Technologies (the company that hosts this blog) shared a very helpful system with me. In order to turn emails into action items, he tags things that must be done during the current day with an "@today" tag. Then, when clicking on the tab identifier or label, he can easily see all the items which need to be immediately done. The great thing about tags is that they can be applied to a variety of different tools (such as documents) and not just emails. There are any number of tags that may be created, and items may be assigned multiple tags. In addition, there are some messages that do not necessarily have an action assigned to them. Those I move to a unique folder I created for storage and retention at a later time.

Now I hesitate to brag because I know the dangers of pride, but right now I have nothing in the inbox of any email account that has not been tagged. I find myself feeling better about email by making an immediate decision about each message and by keeping the inbox uncluttered.

By the way, the newest email service offered by Icthus Technologies in connection with their web services offers all of these organizational tools and more. It is connected with a commercial product called Zimbra, and you might want to check it out.

It finally feels like email is working more for me than me working for email. Isn't that the way it is supposed to be? And now that I feel like this tool is working for me, I can better prepare my students to have technology work for them instead of the other way around.