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...

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Posted on 16 Mar 2011 | Comments Off

Avoid, embrace the email situation.

Next up in my Avoid, Embrace project: the email situation. Step one: write about something I have been avoiding. My email is now not a tool but a situation. I have ActiveInbox chugging along, filing things away merrily so that I have Inbox Zero. This is nice. What is not nice is the 132 emails that need some sort of attention on my part. (That number increased to 137 just since I started writing this. Yikes.) I look at these emails in their pretty little categories that make sense, but I don’t do anything with them. Clearly, the first ones I need to tackle are my Flagged items. I flag email sparingly; it usually means that if I do not do this as soon as possible today, something Very Bad will happen. There is only one thing here today, and I can get it...

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Posted on 9 Mar 2011 | 2 comments