Fling Media

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Get Control of Your Inbox

Using Apple’s Mail, MailTags & MailActOn

Staying on top of the onslaught of email can seems like an uphill and sometimes losing battle. Your inbox can be like a bucket that is constantly being filled but you can’t empty it fast enough to keep it from overflowing.

A cluttered and full inbox, with hundreds of old messages spanning many months, doesn’t do you any good except to cloud your thoughts, stress you out and ultimately lower your productivity.

A couple of years ago I tried an experiment to apply the 3,000 year old concepts of Feng Shui to how I organized my email. I found that through triage and organization I was able to reduce inbox clutter and the loose ends each day and find some inner calm.

Today, by using a couple of simple techniques and some cool software, you can use a less new-agey means to simplify your message stream and get back to work. I’ll show you how to use Apple’s Mail and a couple of excellent tools called MailTags and MailActOn to get control of your inbox in 10 steps or less.

Step 1: Use Apple’s Mail

When it comes to email, Apple’s default mail application, conspicuously called Mail, is elegant Apple simplicity at it’s best. The application is very straight-forward and easy to use.

Unlike Microsoft’s Outlook or Entourage (the Microsoft’s answer to Outlook on a Mac), Mail is just focused on being a good mail client, using integration with external applications like Address Book and iCal.

Yes, there are about as many different ways to read email as there are types of trees, but Mail, together with a couple of plug-ins which I’ll talk about here in a minute, is going to rock your world.

If you don’t have a Mac, or refuse to use Mail, you can still read on as I will point out a couple of tips that will help you control your inbox that doesn’t require any special hardware or software at all.

If you Windows readers out there have some recommendations on how to do what I suggest on Windows, please add them to the comments below.

Step 2: Understand Getting Things Done (GTD)

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (commonly referred to as GTD) is a fantastic book about how to reclaim your productivity and reduce stress. Like the harmony through organization concept of Feng Shui, GTD relies on simple triage and organization of information, but comes with the mandatory 21st century acronym.

Getting Things Done imparts a lot of great wisdom on how to become more productive, but the most typical outcome to most is the creation of an information triage mechanism. Like the example diagram, information comes in and is sorted and acted on based on it’s actionablity.

To briefly put on my psychology hat, another great concept to understand how we set and take action on our goals is called the Delmore Effect. Named after the a failed poet Delmore Schwartz, the idea is that most people are more likely to set more specific goals for lower priority humdrum tasks than we do our greatest ambitions.

For example, we put more weight and spend more time thinking about tasks such as “I need to pickup the dry-cleaning” rather than set goals or even think about long term goals like “I want to be an architect.”

The Delmore Effect is happens to everyone and is one of the greatest causes of us not doing what we want to do. The concepts behind Getting Things Done provide a means of sifting through those humdrum activities allowing you to focus on what is most important to you.

What I’ve learned is you don’t have to follow GTD as law, just understand the methods and techniques and find one that works for you.

(To read more about the Delmore Effect read Paul Whitmore’s Dissertation The Maieutics of Goal Articulation: Motivating the Choices of Highest Import.)

Step 3: Start a single Archive Folder

Most people I know create a lot of folders to store their mail, based on a project or concept, I used to be one. The problem I found was I would spend more time fishing for the name of a project I worked on a year ago, when I really wanted to find a link to a website or an email address that wasn’t 100% related to the project, only came in from that information stream.

That is when I adopted a single folder, which I call Archive. Once a email is no longer actionable or relevant to me they go to the Archive folder to rest in peace. I never delete any email sent specifically to me (junk mail, newsletters, mailing lists and such get the trash can).

Once I am done with a triaged task I move the message to Archive. If a email is just a FYI or unactionable, it goes to Archive. When I want to recall some information I rely on doing a simple search. By simply telling Mail what information I seek, I can typically find the desired message within seconds.

When I tell people about this approach it amazes me how few people rely on search within their mail client. I guess like in observed web behavior, there are hunters who search for what they need and there are gatherers who store what they need. If you are a gatherer, we will get to some tricks that will make it easier to gather effectively.

The goal is to make the act of archiving a one step process. A big part of getting control of your inbox is to be able to triage and filter information quickly. If if takes you more than a second to store a message, then you are taking too long.

Make it as brainless as possible.

Step 4: Setup your Triage or GTD Folders

Once we have an Archive folder to place all unactionable or actioned messages, we need to setup folders for us to triage and act from. Remember the goal is keep your inbox free of storing messages and only use it as a central hub in which you triage from.

It is important to create folders that work for you, they can be as unique as you are and you may need to experiment to find what works best.

The traditional GTD approach would be to create the following:

1. Action (...do this ASAP!)
2. Hold (...until your Action queue clears)
3. Respond (...to this)
4. Wait On (...until you hear from someone)
5. Someday (...your dreams will come true)

I’ve tried this approach and I found it too complex and ambiguous. There were too many folders to not only triage, but also recall, I could never remember which ones were which.

So I pared it down to three by combining the concepts to what made sense to me:

1. Action or Respond
2. Hold or Followup
3. Someday

This worked like a champ!

My Action folder served as my primary to-do list, but since I do a lot of business development here at Blue Flavor as well as host and attend a lot of events, I wanted to create some specific folders to keep those concepts filtered out from my day-today. I also added the rarely ever used Urgent folder, for the drop everything! people are dying! tasks or threads that occur from time to time.

So while that takes me back up to five folders like the original GTD they are highly tailored to how I think and work.

Here is what they look like today.

Those with a keen eye will notice that I do have subfolders within my GTD folders. I have a few other extra filters that I apply, but rarely use. They come in handy during really busy weeks or when I’m on the road and get a little backed up with messages.

The best advice I can offer on finding the right organization is keep it simple and add to it over time.

Step 5: Install MailActOn

This next step is one of the handy inventions that I don’t know how I survived without. It is a free plug-in for Apple’s Mail called Mail Act-On.

How MailAct-On works is very simple: once you are done viewing a message, you hit the defined MailAct-On Key (I like to use the space bar) it brings up the following bezel menu.

Now when I press a* it executes my rule to move the selected message to my Archive folder.

By adding MailAct-On to Mail, you can triage your inbox in seconds. I like to keep all my actions keys close to the spacebar, allowing me to triage with just my left hand. If I get carpal-tunnel it will be from pressing *spacebar a a hundred times a day.

Combined with your rules you can do some really powerful actions, but before I get into creating your rules, there is another plug-in which will when combined with MailAct-On will certainly rock your information overloaded world!

Step 6: Install MailTags

If MailAct-On wasn’t enough of a time saver, Scott Morrison, the same developer of MailAct-On has created another plug-in called MailTags. MailTags allows you to apply tags/keywords, assign projects, priorities, due-dates and other metadata to your messages. While this plug-in is not free, it is well worth the $25 and I encourage you to give the free trial a spin.

MailTags adds an optional pane to your messages allowing you to add a lot of extra data to your outgoing messages (I’m using the MailTags 2.0 beta at the time of this writing).

You can also open the MailTags pane in the viewer so you can quickly add extra information to your incoming messages.

Most messages that you send with MailTags data returns with that data, so you typically only have to tag each thread.

MailTags also adds more search filters to Mail. So once you’ve started tagging your messages you will be able to recall them faster. The downside is that you need to keep your Mail viewer a little larger than I typically prefer in order to see all the options.

Now I’m admittedly not a metadata guy. I like to file my messages as quickly as possible and taking time out to tag an message seems to defeat the purpose of quick and easy triage. That is where MailAct-On comes back into the picture.

Installing MailTags also adds the ability to create new MailTag rules like assigning keywords, due dates or projects.

Next up how to create rules to harness the power of MailAct-On and MailTags.

Step 7: Setup Your Rules

Now that we have MailAct-On and MailTags installed we are ready to start building some rules. MailAct-On will install some default rules which I quickly delete.

MailAct-On looks for rules that begin with Act-On which should live beneath the Act-On: Stop Processing Receive Rules rule. This tells Mail to not run your MailAct-On Rules on every message than comes in.

The Archive Rule which we’ve already seen is pretty simple, move the message to your Archive folder.

For my Action Rule I combine moving the message as well as a few MailTags, like priority and due date. Making the message unread also allows you to see how many messages are your folder at a glance.

For my Biz Dev Rule I add a keyword of bizdev so I can recall everything biz dev related through a very simple search.

Again, start simple and play around with your rules in order to fine tune them to your work style and how you think. There is a lot of power here to create pretty complicated rules, but start simple and go from there.

Pretty quickly be automagically assigning metadata at the same time you are triaging your inbox!

Step 8: Setup Smart Mailboxes

Remember we talked about Hunters and Gatherers? A big advantage of Apple’s Mail is the ability to create Smart Mailboxes which is a perfect solution for those you like to store your email into nicely filed folders. The trick is by using Smart Mailboxes you can do it without having to actually file the message into your folder.

Just create a new Smart Mailbox and define what information you want to recall, like the project name or keyword. For example to view all my Biz Dev related messages:

I now have an overview of all my messages regardless of where they are located, in my GTD folders or in my Archive.

It is just that simple: keep your triage simple and use Mail to do the heavy lifting of sorting and filtering your data through intelligent rules.

Step 9: Triage Messages

Now that all your steps are in place, you just need to triage your mail as it comes in. You will find that you can triage dozens of emails in seconds, minimizing time spent digging through folders and more time on the important work.

Remember these important tips:

• Try to keep your inbox as clean as you can
• Don’t forget to action your Action folder (seriously, you will!)
• Go through your folders at least once a week to file and re-prioritize
• Leave each day with all your messages triaged
• Use the spacebar as your MailAct-On menu trigger
• Keep your MailAct-On rule triggers within reach of the spacebar with one hand
• Start simple and refine over time

Step 10: Control Your Inbox

Once you have your process in place I guarantee you will find email much easier to manage, respond to people faster and will feel like you are in control of your inbox and it isn’t in control of you.

And don’t forget Delmore Schwartz, its just email. Don’t ever let it get in the way of doing what is most important to you.

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