Comments on: TIP: To-Do Email Folder

By: Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:30:53 +0000

I take a similar approach. It’s like email zero except I leave todo items sitting in my in-box, rarely more than five or six items. That’s not enough to become a problem and an automatic reminder every time I read my incoming mail.

By: Omar

Omar — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:22:42 +0000

I went with this system a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. One twist is that I have a mail rule that takes all my inbox mail and moves it to another “home” folder. That way, my replies stay in the same folder as well. Any messages I create still go to my Sent folder, but they are easy to drag back to the Home folder until the topic is dead. Then all the various messages can easily be dragged to the archive folder (one folder per year for ease of pruning to an archive file when I run over my mailbox limit).

I delete very few messages anymore. It wastes too much time deciding if I should keep something or not.

Someone else mentioned this as well. For meeting request emails, I drag them to my calendar, then just have to enter the date and time particulars. For emails that require action on my part, I drag them to my Task folder. All I do there is put the next day I intend to look at the task as my followup date. My tasks are sorted by followup date, so they are sorted by priority.

It’s not perfect yet, but it’s about as simple as I could make it in daily use.

By: Jeff Miles

Jeff Miles — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:15:22 +0000

Michael Hyatt (The CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers) wrote this blog entry (http://michaelhyatt.com/2008/06/yes-you-can-stay-on-top-of-email.html/) about how he handles his email and he embraces the 1 folder concept. I tend to agree with him. There is a lot of mental baggage associated with having a busy inbox where if you move them to a processed folder you get the search benefit you mentioned but the clean slate benefit as well. I like your idea of To-Do folders though and might have to give that a shot.

By: Mark Shead

Mark Shead — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:12:10 +0000

@Julian & Lori – the problem I ran into with keeping things in another folder is that it makes it harder to find if I’m on a different computer or my Blackberry. I’m also experimenting with moving any ToDo items to OmniFocus and so far that seems to be working pretty well.

I tried using Apple’s Todo, but it made a mess of things on my Exchange server. With the better Exchange integration in Snow Leopard I might have to try it again. Thanks for the suggestion.

By: Lori Krolik

Lori Krolik — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:56:33 +0000

I like your thinking, but another suggestion be Michale Linenberger of Total Workday Control is to transfer all of your processed mail to a “processed mail folder” that you can search as needed. Only keep in your inbox messages you need to act on. You don’t even have to create folders for filing messages. If you use the sorting function or have a good search tool, like yahoo desktop search you can easily find whatever message you are looking for.

By: Julian Schrader

Julian Schrader — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:47:55 +0000

Hi Mark,

I use Apple Mail as well and like to keep a clean Inbox to immediately spot new/pending mails.

Once I process my Inbox, I read and decide which one of three actions I do to each mail:

1.) Delete (best one)
2.) Archive (contains information I may need again)
3.) Apply GTD

…whereas option #3 means: If the “2 minute rule” applies, get it done and delete or archive, if not, create an item in Things.app (Ctrl + Option + Command + Spacebar) with the mail’s subject & archive (automatically creates a link back to the e-mail).

By: Kris

Kris — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:26:13 +0000

One tip I could offer, I flag my emails in Outlook and put a little note as to what needs to be done. Then you can choose your fields on your inbox so it shows the text of your flag. This has helped me tremendously, so I have a one word reminder as to what needs to be done w/ a particular email.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:23:00 +0000

@Michael – Great tip! Thanks for sharing it. I haven’t used Outlook for several years, so I didn’t know about that. There is supposed to be something similar in Apple Mail in 10.5, but I haven’t looked very closely at it.

By: Michael Raia

Michael Raia — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:57:25 +0000

Not a lot of people using Outlook realize you can drag and drop e-mails from the Inbox to the Tasks icon on the left. This automatically creates a new task using the subject line of the e-mail as the task name and the body of the e-mail as the task body. Then you can quickly assign it a date with a reminder and save it. The original email stays in the Inbox. I use this all day long and I couldn’t get things done without it.

By: Dana

Dana — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:14:56 +0000

Hi Mark, good post – I’m with you 100% on keeping as much as possible in your inbox for quick searches. I’ve found flagging to-do messages to be priceless, having ’smart searches’ set up to quickly find those flags works great.

On a side-note, I keep all Excels, Docs, and PPTs in a big folder as well. Once you come up with your personal file-naming structure, you can find your files amazingly fast, and not have to worry about where you ‘dropped’ it.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:35:58 +0000

@Ron – I’ve been impressed with Gmail, but I’m not quite ready to give up IMAP and go back to POP. But I agree, the label and tags idea is probably the best solution.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:33:52 +0000

@AL – I really like GMails, label concept. It would really do exactly what I need. Unfortunately I haven’t made the switch to using non-client based email all the time. I still like having it actually running on my computer. Part of this is because I frequently use very slow or high latency connections where using the web is painfully slow.

I’m going to look into the MailTags plugin that Gaz mentioned to see if it might work for me. It would be really nice if it would sync with Gmail labels.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:29:34 +0000

@Gaz – I put things I need to do in the to-do folder. Once they are completed I move them back into my main email list–it is kind of like tagging emails. I use Apple Mail as well, so I’ll have to check into the MailTags plugin.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:23:54 +0000

@Rob – The search folders sounds like an excellent idea. I’ve started using search folders to keep track of incoming bills and it seems to be working well.

Keeping a single archive folder sounds like a good idea. I may have to try that. When I was on an exchange server, I had a .pst file that I would move everything older than 6 months into. My laptop was synched with the most recent 6 months and if I needed anything else I could get it off the terminal server.

By: Ron Larson

Ron Larson — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:39:53 +0000

Gmail is perfect for this. You just tag the mails with the client name. You can flag action items with a star, then unstar them when you are done dealing with it. I find it much easier than moving things to folders.