Avoiding, embracing email: one week later
Here is my one-week check-in for my Avoid, Embrace project on email. So far, the biggest change I have made is in filtering out forwards into their own folder. In Gmail, I used this filter to do the trick:
from:(email address of forwarder | email address of another forwarder)
to:(-my email address)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “SA/Forwards”
I chose to deal with them as “announcements” per ActiveInbox’s built-in label category, but you can use anything you like.
Filtered out into their own folder, I can look at the subject lines and delete accordingly. Now the only items in my “Someday” category are things I want to legitimately do or review someday. This is a huge win!
The “Time” labels have been somewhat helpful, but because I am on spring break this week, I am just going through messages regardless of how long I think they might take.
I have been setting meaningful deadlines, for the most part, but I am pretty lazy at the moment so there are some un-deadlined items floating about that I need to attack.
The state of my email, as of right now:
- Flagged items: Zero!
- Action items: Twelve, up from ten. I moved some mislabeled "Someday" items here.
- Waiting On: Four, down from seven. Resolution, hooray!
- Someday: Forty, a mere third of last week's 120.
It looks pretty good from here.