Glenn Wolsey: 6 email tips

Glenn Wolsey—6 Ways To Organize - Your Mail Application

Glenn Wolsey has a great little post on how he’s set up and is using Mail.app. He’s got some very smart stuff here, including an intriguing approach to minimalist mailbox management:

Create 3 folders and name them Follow-Up, Interesting & To Do. Then, as you check your emails file them straight into the applicable folder.

Later, when you have time you can go straight to these folders folder and work through them. It will be much quicker to see what needs attending to and you are more likely to might be motivated to spare a few minutes clearing your to-do folder.

The “Interesting” folder is a new one to me, and, although I personally favor a more verb-y approach to my email buckets, that would be a cool way to bubble up stuff you don’t want to miss after a big round of processing.

As we covered in Inbox Zero, it’s all about liberating the actions out of your mail. Like any of this stuff, if the system makes sense to you and gives you transparent affordances for instantly knowing “where it goes” and “what you need to do about it,” then you’re on to something.

Nice work, Glenn!

[...] Merlin Mann of 43...

[…] Merlin Mann of 43 Folders clued me in to this recent post by 14 year old New Zealand blogger Glenn Wolsey. Dealing with e-mail is becoming more and more difficult over time, and it is probably going to get worse rather than better. Even excluding spam (of which I get at least 50 a day), sorting, categorizing, and responding to e-mail is taking up more and more of a person’s working day. How can we deal with this mess? […]