E-mail plans
When I moved from Gmail to Operation Nucifera, my mail server project in collaboration with Ben and Jonathan, I had to empty my inbox. And I managed it, after hours of struggle. I set up several macros in mutt to try to help me keep it that way. But it didn’t work. So now I’m emptying my inbox again and intend to use the following plan (which I sort of had before, but which I wasn’t strict about) to keep things in order into the future.
- After every e-mail session, there should be *no* unread messages in my inbox.
- For each message, one of the following things will be done:
- If the message requires nothing more than a reply or a reply and a five minute task, then do so, and archive the message.
- If the message spawns a proper task, add to normal task list and leave message in inbox. On task completion try to remember to archive message, though this is less important as messages marked as read do not represent significant inbox burden.
- If the message can’t be dealt with because it is too long to read, will only be relevant after a certain date or if it only requires a reply but this reply requires more thought/time than is available, flag the message
- After performing step 2 on the inbox, check secondary folders with less rigour.
This plan comes from various productivity articles I’ve read over the years. Do you think it’ll work? Only the dawn of Michaelmas will tell.