My email inbox is beginning to overflow!

User comments, feature suggestions, order notification, press release responses...and it's starting to take to much time.

In response I'm trying to develop a process to handle and organize all incoming email, but I'm a little unsure on where to start.

I'm curious how others deal with this and would love to hear general suggestions on how best to handle incoming email. I also have a few basic questions.

1. Will I need it all? For personal email I tend to keep ever incoming email. Do you do the same for shareware related email, or is it better to clean house and delete nonessential ("great job") type emails when they come in?

2. Do you maintain an address book? Who goes into it? I need to start maintaining an address book so that I can associate notes ("such as this is my best beta tester") with email addresses. But I'm not sure who should go in it. Should I take the time to add every person who ever emails me, or only people that I know I should remember ahead of time.

3. I use Apples Mail.app. Is using a standard email program sufficient for this type of organization, Or will moving to a contact specific database give me worthwhile benefits? What do you use to organize your contact information and email history?

Thanks,
Jesse

1: I tend to keep most email that contains any kind of usable information, and the best "good job" emails just for kicks :)

For question #2 you basically answered your own question :)

3: I haven't used Apple Mail so I don't know how capable it is, but you might want to move to a more advanced e-mail application. Essential features are quick and easy filters to automatically organize your mail into sensible categories as far as possible. Outlook 2000 does it for me, I know there may be better e-mail programs around but it has pretty much all features I need. The only irritating thing about Outlook is that searches are very slow.

not sure if "claris organiser" is still around but that was the most brilliant piece of software i've ever seen for this kind of work.


pat.

Thanks for the Claris Organizer suggestion. It seems that it turned into Palm Desktop, I'm trying that out now.

Here's another question. I'm thinking that I can offload some of this correspondence into user forums, or maybe a wiki. I know that user forums are often used by shareware authors, but what about wiki's? It seems to me that a wiki might be a great place to organize comments and suggestions about my software. Users could read the wiki so they could do a bit of self filtering and not make the same suggestion 1000 times...:)

It would mean that product ideas wouldn't be so private, competitors could also see them. But my initial though is that execution is a lot more important in the shareware market then keeping ideas private.

Anybody used a wiki for this sort of thing? Would it be useful or do you see problems with the idea?

Jesse

I keep three accounts...
One is my main account, which usually consists of business inquiries and customer support.

My second account is purely where all order notifications go (I use web based squirrel mail to receive orders so I keep it out of my inbox)

And my third is a personal box (hotmail)

It works best when you keep things web-based, especially if you have a server for the site so you dont get email caps.

Alex

The best thing to do is find a program similar to MS Outlook, that has Mail Filters. Then you can process incoming emails by subject keywords and sort them into the proper folders (bugs, press releases, etc.) It may not work 100% of the time, but it should help quite a bit to sort things out.

I get a lot of legitimate email of various kinds and have a wonderful system for handling it all, which can be done with any email program such as Outlook Express. I used to have an overflowing email inbox a couple years ago, but no longer. Now the usual state of my email inbox is to be totally empty. Right now it contains a handful of emails, the oldest of which is two days old, but these haven't been read or replied to yet.

I highly recommend reading David Allen's book Getting Things Done, which I know I've pushed here several times in the past year. Although not specific to email, the book will give you the organizing principles to understand why your email inbox is cluttered and how to permanently solve this problem. The problem is essentially that you're trying to use your email inbox as a to-do list and/or or reference file, and it isn't properly suited to either of these tasks. Every email must be "processed," such that you read it, make a decision on it, reply to it if needed, and then either delete it or file it. If you need to remember to do something related to that email, then you should add an item to your to do list or calendar, and then file the email and get it out of your inbox.

For instance, if a developer emails me to say a new build of their game is ready for QA, I'll give them a quick reply, file the email in that developer's folder in my email program, and then add an item to my to do list to "begin QA for new build of game X." I never use email as a to do list. My inbox is nothing but an inbox. Once an email has been read, I must right then and then get it out of the inbox and add the appropriate items to my calendar, to-do list, idea list, etc.

I have dozens of email folders. I create new folders whenever I want to keep something new for future reference. All customer correspondence is kept in a single folder. Anyone else I correspond with regularly will have a folder dedicated to them. I don't save every email unless I feel I'd need it again. I also have lots of auto-sorting filters, so certain types of new email are automatically sorted into new folders so I can handle them all at once.

There's a lot more to it, but all the other details are in David Allen's book, and I don't have time right now to summarize the rest of the book in this post.

Just a technical detail about your sorting Steve. Do you actually maintain your To-Do in a different format than e-mail?

I currently have three Next-Action sources:
- Email folder named @ACTION
- ActionOutline to-dos
- Palm To-dos

The problem is that there are too many sources for next actions resulting in difficult prioritizing. I like ActionOutline most, and I would love it if I could synchronize it with the Palm instead of using the Palm Desktop software, which isn't nearly as good.

What sources of Next Actions do you use and how do you prioritize between them?

I personally second the David Allen recomendation, it has also eased my burden a lot.

Originally posted by jgrosjean
3. I use Apples Mail.app. Is using a standard email program sufficient for this type of organization, Or will moving to a contact specific database give me worthwhile benefits? What do you use to organize your contact information and email history?

Jesse,

I also use Mail.app and it takes care of most everything fairly well. I do tend to be pretty retentive when it comes to keeping mail around, plus backing up ~/Library/Mail/ to a CD every few days is a snap!

Over the last 10 or so years, I've developed a pretty consistent mechanism for keeping email organized, but the single biggest suggestion I can make is being consistent. It only takes about 20-30 repetitions of a complex task to form a habit, so as long as you're consistent you shouldn't have any problems.

Start by identifying the reason that you're retaining a particular message...

Is it a feature request
Is it a customer support issue
Is it a business communication (non-customer)
Is it a mailing list message

Now, be ruthless in setting up filters. I have about 10 "in-boxes" for various reasons (To:, List-Id:, Subject:, etc). Sort all your incoming messages into some destination. If an incoming message stays in my inbox, it's usually because it's a personal message and not business related. In addition to my inboxes, I also have myriad "keeper" boxes -- recipes in one, SDL list notes in another, hosting invoices in another. I am religious about using mail folders as filing cabinets. If the subject matter of several messages in the same folder begin to diverge, then I create new sub-folders (nesting is great!) and start re-filtering.

Also, be ruthless in creating and deleting filters. If there's a thread on a mailing list that you want to keep an eye on, create a filter and new mailbox. That way you can keep *that* thread separate from the rest of the messages. I'll also do this with some people -- if one of my best customers sends me an e-mail, I have it go to a particular box that I keep tabs on as "special".

As for keeping a separate contact database, there are lots of existing products out there that do adequate jobs, but I've found that an AppleWorks database geared specifically toward my consulting gigs has worked best for me. I also plan on composing an AppleWorks database for storing beta tester information. Ultimately, though, I think I'll be switching this over to a MySQL database, as I find its relational model a little easier to deal with, plus the reporting and admin tools are top-notch. And, in true "data mining" fashion, don't worry about what to track and what not to track -- just record it all. If you get some small piece of insignificant information about one of your clients (favorite color), you may someday use this to your advantage.

But definitely don't sell Apple's AddressBook short. The great thing about it is that there are API hooks into it that you can use if you want to do interesting things to your contact lists...

Overall, though, I'd say that this is one case in my life where "more is more" rather than "less is more". I believe in sorting down to a pretty minute level, and contrary to what many believe, it's pretty easy to keep this organized and to identify messages. I will sometimes use "grep -r" in a Terminal.app window, but not very often.

Good luck!
-daniel

I keep my next actions, projects, and someday-maybe lists in ActionOutline, which is always running in the taskbar. I love that I can quickly call it up with a hotkey at any time, add or remove a task, project, or idea, and then quickly close it. It's a very fast tool for this.

I used my Palm for this a couple years ago, but it's just too slow for me in practice, so now my Palm is collecting dust.

In answer to your question, ideally you should have only one next actions list. You can have multiple projects lists arranged by category, but you should maintain only one next actions list. Ok, maybe two if you want to keep your personal and business actions separate, but you shouldn't separate based on different technologies being used to store different lists. That's going to increase your mental load instead of simplifying things. So I use ActionOutline for everything here.

I've also added a tool to Allen's system which has become an essential part of my system: a daily paper schedule. On a single piece of paper, I print out a template for each day. This acts as a combined checklist and schedule. It contains some pre-scheduled daily items, both personal and business-related such as: exercise, check sales stats, check web stats, check & reply to email, check forums & newsgroups, process inbox, handle accounting, etc. These things I do every morning from 8-10:30am, sometimes rescheduling them to other times as needed. So each morning I simply go down the checklist, and this ensures that no routine tasks pile up on me. Having a simple daily checklist reduces the mental load too, since I never have to try to remember to do any of these things. They simply get done every morning. If I get a huge surge of email, I'll simply let some of it go until the next day, so I don't spend all morning just on email. Email is rarely urgent and almost any email can wait 1-2 days for a reply. Most days though, when I process my email, I do it all at once and empty my inbox completely.

Most of the rest of the daily tempalte page is blank space, where I fill in the tasks I expect to complete during those times. In the early afternoon I have a block for sales & marketing work, and the late afternoon is devoted to product development & publishing work. I use the late morning block for everything else. I always overschedule these blocks intentionally, so that unfinished tasks will simply carry over to the next day. I never want to have to go back to my ActionOutline during the day to select what I should do next -- it's all planned in advance.

At the end of every day, I fill in my daily template for the next day. The pages are pre-printed with all the routine daily tasks, and then I hand-write all the other tasks I want to complete that day into the appropriate time blocks: late morning, early afternoon, or late afternoon. I review the filled-in template once before going to bed, so I have a clear picture of how I expect the next day to unfold. All the tasks I use to fill in the template are simply those from my next actions list in Action Outline.

If something comes up during the day that I know I'll need to handle that day, I write it down somewhere on the page, and then check it off when I do it. I may also make notes on the page for other tasks and ideas I want to incorporate into my system. Then at the end of each day, I review the page, fill out the page for the next day, and then process any notes or other unfinished items into my ActionOutline system.

I like this system a lot because I find that in the short timespan of a few hours or a single day, I work best on paper. But for planning several days or weeks ahead and maintaining a large list of projects and actions, good software is best. So I use a piece of paper to manage my schedule and to dos throughout the course of each day, always going back to update the computer version afterwards for the long-term stuff. I find this extremely flexible, and it's the best system I've used by far.

Another advantage to having the template/checklist for every day on paper is that at the end of each day, I can review my whole day at a glance. Every evening from 9-9:30pm, I review the day's template page in detail and essentially "postmortem" it in my journal. What went right? What went wrong? How can I learn from this? Most days I'll come up with a few actionable items that I add to my next day's schedule. I do this religiously and will nitpick the hell out of each day looking for ways to increase efficiency. Usually this involves some form of automation -- if a routine task takes me too long, I'll try to automate it more and more.

The benefit to me of having each day planned out in advance is that I never have to think about what I should be doing next at any point during the day. I need only follow the template step by step until the day is over. All decisions about what to do today were made last night. Of course there are always urgencies and unexpected events, so sometimes my schedule is thrown completely off kilter, but most days are smooth and productive.

DCoder makes some great points. I think the key is that an organizing system is not something you simply create once and then run forever in a static mode. It's like a piece of software that's constantly being upgraded. You don't create a filing system one day and have everything perfect. It's the ongoing habit of refactoring your filing system that matters in the long run. Any static system will begin to degrade almost immediately.

Every week I am creating new email folders and deleting or archiving obsolete ones. It's a constant process of keeping everything organized and clean, but in practice it amounts to only a few minutes a day on average. No one folder structure will handle all my needs indefinitely, whether it be email folders, hard drive directories, or physical files in a filing cabinet.

Any system must evolve with the person using it.

Thank you DCoder and Steve P. for the excellent ideas. I fully agree that a system needs to constantly evolve to be up to date, I know mine has a great deal. It is very inspirational to hear how other people handle themselves, it keeps you fresh with new ideas to try out and experiment with.

I especially liked the day template. I have been using a week template like that but it felt cumbersome, yet when I tried to give up the paper I had much more difficult to keep myself focused. Having your tasks physically expressed (written) seems to contain almost some magic to it, they are much easier to work on that way.

@KP: You're welcome.

I do have one major failing with my inbox filing system... I tend to let stuff that I need to deal with stack up in my inbox. Currently there are 96 messages in my inbox that are in a "holding pattern". Most of them are from current threads that I'm in the middle of that I don't want to lose track of. There's also the occassional "scrap-of-paper"-type note (the oldest dating back to Oct 15 of last year -- it's the VPN ip for my daytime office :-p ).

Mostly though it's communiques from old friends or associates that I need to get around to replying to, but I just haven't -- because I never think about doing it until I start cleaning out my inbox. And since I'm in the process of cleaning out my inbox (a task), I don't want to shift gears and start on another task (replying to old messages). By the time I finish organizing, I've totally forgotten about doing the replies or follow-ups. Woops.

Which brings me to the point of this message... Last night I couldn't stand it any longer -- I finally went out and bought David Allen's Getting Things Done and at first glance (intro and chapter 1) it looks great. I love the concept of NextActions, which Steve has mentioned here several times. I'm pretty religious about keeping lists of things I want to accomplish, but often I am not atomic enough with what I need to do to move each forward to completion. Despite some rather poor reviews on Amazon, this book looks like it's going to provide some valuable information.

I paid $14 (full retail) at B&N because I wanted it right now, but it's currently on Amazon for about 20% off, or you can find used ones on Half.com for about half-price.

Hopefully, it will help me better understand how to organize my own NextActions to be more productive. I'll let you all know.

-daniel

I had the same problem with an overflowing email inbox, as mentioned previously. It took me a while to fully master this problem, but I feel I've done so, and I could never go back to the way things were. It always gives me a sense of accomplishment to get my inbox emptied every morning. Then I can spend the rest of each day working on my most important projects in a relaxed and focused state with no distractions.

I take action on every email the first time I read it. Normally I don't even look at email #2 until I've fully handled email #1 and it's out of my inbox. There's always something I can do to move each email out of the inbox. If I need to gather more information before replying such as for a contract review, then I'll move the email to one of my reference folders, and add an item to my next actions list or calendar to gather the required info and then reply to the email. I never use the emails themselves as a reminder that I need to reply. People who do this will constantly read and re-read the same emails over and over. It's incredibly distracting and stressful. How would it feel if the normal state of your inbox was to be totally empty, and every time you checked email you returned your inbox to this virgin state?

I do the same thing with paper documents, bills, contracts, etc. If I'm not going to need a piece of paper for several days, I file it away and add an item to my to do list or calendar to take the appropriate action. I never use email or paper docs as a reminder that I need to do something. That only creates clutter and increases my mental load significantly. It's far simpler to keep all my to dos in a single comprehensive system. The only piece of paper on my entire desk right now is my paper daily template. Everything else is filed away, available to me when I'm ready to take action on it. My desk has a 4-drawer filing cabinet next to it, and I have plenty of small shelves and drawers within arms reach, so it's very easy for me to file and retrieve anything I might need.

I know many people who use bills as reminders. They have stacks of bills sitting on their desk, and they have to go through the stack every few days to see if anything is due. Sometimes they won't even take the bills out of the envelope for a few days. But people who do this waste so much time looking at that stack of bills, thinking about it, being distracted by it, shuffling through it, adding to it, etc. Not to mention the risk of being late on paying bills and the stress that's created in trying to remember when things are due. It's far simpler to just handle each bill as soon as it comes. You can either pay it right away, or file it away in a drawer and add a note to your calendar when you'll pay it. Better yet, see if you can setup auto-billing for your accounts, so you have fewer bills to pay manually (either via mail or online).

I used to think that being organized was a lot more work than being disorganized. But the exact opposite is true. Disorganized people spend far more time on routine tasks, and they have a much higher mental load and higher stress trying to remember everything. But when you have an integrated system that takes care of everything, it only takes minutes a day to maintain, and you'll feel very relaxed and confident that nothing will slip through the cracks. Your emotional stability is proportional to the degree of control you think you have over your life. Being organized increases this feeling of control, and thus you feel more stable, calm, and at peace.

A side-benefit of having a solid organizing system is that you have more time for spontaneity. You never need to deal with clutter, since it's prevent from forming, so you'll save hours every week. Sometimes my wife and I will wake up in the morning, and one of us will say, "Hey, let's go to Disneyland today." An hour later we're at the park with our daughter, and we enjoy a stress-free day there and have a great time. It's a nice way of rewarding ourselves. Years ago we even woke up one Tuesday morning and took a spontaneous 3-day trip to Vegas. We were at the hotel within about 5.5 hours of getting the idea, and Vegas is a 4.5 hour drive from us. And it was one of the best trips we ever had. Giving yourself these kinds of treats is a great way to reward yourself for going through all the effort of getting organized. You can take the time you used to spend dealing with piles of clutter and invest it in activities you really enjoy.

Steve and Kai-Peter -
Do either of you use the "tickler" system that Allen advocates? I set one up and didn't seem to have much success with it.

I setup a tickler file initially when I first read Allen's book, but after a few weeks I found it utterly useless for me, since it was mostly empty all the time, and I soon got rid of it. For certain professionals that handle a lot of paperwork it might work well, but most of my work is digitized. It was a waste of time for me to check the file every morning only to find it empty.

I happen to think the tickler file is a flaw in Allen's system. All the other to do items are conveniently organized in one place, and calendar and to-do lists can be reviewed at a glance. But the tickler file is a separate parallel to do list and calendar in a file drawer, and in this case you're using the physical papers as a reminder of a project or next action, which I consider a mistake. If you use a tickler file, you end up splintering your whole system. I prefer to keep all actions on my calendar and to do list, and file any reference papers away. I can always note the storage location of these materials when I type up the next action. This way I can survey my upcoming actions and projects at a glance without having to go to a file drawer to check those items too.

Allen seems to swear by ticker files though, so maybe he finds that it works well for him and his clients. At first glance I thought it was a great idea too....

My experience was pretty similar. I'm glad to see it wasn't just me. :)

Originally posted by Kai-Peter
Thank you DCoder and Steve P. for the excellent ideas. I fully agree that a system needs to constantly evolve to be up to date, I know mine has a great deal. It is very inspirational to hear how other people handle themselves, it keeps you fresh with new ideas to try out and experiment with.


I go full d'accord with that:cool:

As Master Steve already pointed out you have to constantly change/develop your system since you as a person change too.

So I can’t present you a good system which works for me best but merely point out some good things I found usefull for me.

Everything in folders
I once put every list/idea/project in a folder. This worked so good because the hierachy of the file system is unlimited, the tree can grow as big as you like.
I stopped working this way because I finally build my own tool out of a text editor and a bunch of nifty AppleScripts. Now I do everything with this custom “studio”. Except Email offcourse and Project Milestones I do via PDF.

habits forming list
A little list of “commands” to myself. Read it everyday. Habits “acomplished” so far still in the list but market different color, so I don’t loose gained terrain but see how much I have advanced so far. That keeps you focused; good for your slef-esteem too. Be carefull with naming the commands. For instance “enjoy healthy food” or “conquer your town with your bicycle” do work because they draw a positive image. “Stopp eating meat” and “don’t use your car” won’t work anyway. Try to incorporate the benefit into your goals. Best practice for your marketing copywriting anyway :-)

Acrobat Planner
The Milestones for each projects I keep in a PDF located in thats project folder. The nice thing about Acrobat is that it lets you scribble and note “over” your document. So I can always work on those things like if I had printed it out but without having to print it out.


Actionlist
From my huge ToDo database I generate a daily Actionlist with 5-10 items I definately want to acomplish that specific day.
This list is cool, besides of that I don’t like my goal/todo database. I am working on this for about a year now but I still did not find a solution which fits me well.



Acomplishment Tracker
Before I fill in the Actionlist for the next day, I notch down what I acomplished the current day. You have to close the day before you open a new one. Free your mind of from old battles.

Email
I use Mozilla, filters sort all the incoming mail in different folders. The main benefit from my pov: you don’t have to write “check email” on your todo list which could mean a lot of things, but you have todo list items which are much more specific.

Sort out your todos into categories like tobuy, tovisit etc
The same goes for notes.

Thanks for all the great comments. My inbox is now empty and i feel great!

I was similarly intrigued by the tickler file, but with similar experiences after a while. I don't have anything to put there, ActionOutline works better for this. I think the major reason is that this business has very few strictly time bound issues. Almost the only exception is bills (which can be autopaid) and support mail that don't go into the trickler anyway.