It’s a new year, and chances are you have an inbox stuffed full of old mail that you’ve been meaning to get to for ages. If one of your new year’s resolutions is to keep a tidier inbox, get started now by archiving those old messages you know you’ll never get to. More »
Despite the proliferation of other communications methods, email remains the defining application of the Internet age — and a huge source of frustration when you feel like you’ve got more messages than you can cope with. Here’s some time-honoured tactics for trying to clean out an inbox that’s overloaded with unread emails. More »
Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo writes for the NYT about his custom-crafted email system mixing elements of Inbox Zero and Getting Things Done-ish action rules. Would his system work for you?
When I posted my recent account of how I got my overflowing inbox under control, one reader pointed out that I could have also automatically converted some of the remaining emails into tasks by dragging them into my task list. As it happens, I like to use my Outlook task list purely for stuff directly related to my writing career (assignments and invoices), with email as a separate, more general to-do area. Also, I’m not big on dragging and dropping, and I find the feature is often buggy anyway (as the screenshot indicates).
Of course, I’m not everybody. But Microsoft really wants everyone to use this feature: so much so that it actually removed some other options to make it work. When I first began using Outlook 2007 shortly after its commercial release, I was irked to find that it was apparently no longer possible to sort tasks by subject in regular task view, an option that had existed for several versions before. That seemed like a major omission, so I hassled Microsoft about why that change had been made. Several weeks later, I got a reply which explained that the lack of sorting was because the previous Subject field had been replaced with a new ‘Task Subject’ field:
The Task Subject field was added to Outlook as part of the work done to support treating email items as tasks. It is auto-generated by Outlook. Since a sortable ‘subject’ field was already available, the decision was made not to expend the resources to make this system-generated field sortable.
Me, I’m not convinced that this is much of an excuse (honestly, how hard is it to sort something?) — but it shows that Microsoft remains unafraid to break a perfectly good system just because it thinks it knows better. You can fix this limitation by creating custom views that use the existing Subject field, but I haven’t got around to it yet — and with my own system working, I don’t imagine I well in a hurry. More »
I’m generally pretty organised with my email, and I like to have nothing in my inbox except stuff I haven’t acted on yet. However, a spurt of recent travel and work commitments meant I’d fallen into a familiar but dangerous pattern: grabbing information from emails I needed (and replying when necessary), but not filing or deleting them, and not checking out stuff that didn’t look urgent. The end result: I suddenly had 1328 emails in my inbox, and 401 of them hadn’t even been read. Sounds like a nightmare, but in reality it only took me an hour to get my inbox back under control. More »
When you finally decide you’re going to empty your inbox on a regular basis, the hardest part is getting started—most likely because you’re already buried under an avalanche of messages. Blogger Jason Clarke offers a sensible approach to that first, most difficult push towards Inbox Zero, and he calls it Inbox 0.5. Clarke says that you can cut down a huge pile of messages without losing an entire weekend by processing HALF the number of backed up messages you’ve got each day. So if you’re starting with 700, reduce that to 350 the first day. If you’ve got 400 the next day, reduce that to 200. Rinse and repeat till you’ve conquered the backlog and are just maintaining an empty inbox with new mail that arrives.
