Comments on: Help! In Need of Email Management Overhaul

By: How to Empty Your Inbox « Maximize Your Billable Time

How to Empty Your Inbox « Maximize Your Billable Time — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:41:19 +0000

[...] even a few emails in my Inbox will throw me off, as I have a bad habit of referring back to my Inbox as a “to do” list. When it’s empty, I don’t fall into this trap nearly as [...]

By: Brett Owens

Brett Owens — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:49:55 +0000

Thanks Jenny Probably will finally make the leap on the 2nd monitor…I had been thinking it’d be a hindrance, but obviously it can’t get much worse for me from here

Cool to hear on the folder system, that’s a good way to do it! I’m trying to be more diligent in applying rules…have found batching similar emails to be a huge time saver.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:18:46 +0000

Oh and maybe this is the key to my success so far but there is no separate ‘checking for email’ task in my world. Outlook’s always running. It’s on its own monitor (along w/ skype and onenote). I do my main work on the other 2 monitors.
I think you need another monitor.. I recommend 3

Also if you were checking your calendar, the window title would have changed. So you must have been previewing email for all that outlook time…or napping.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:10:32 +0000

Oh I just played this game. I had the same issue w/ another time management software and eventually just gave up. But just today I gave it another go and think I have the issue licked.
For me the problem is the preview pane. (Sorry, I’m not giving it up. Double clicking each email to read it… not gonna happen.)

So what I did today was setup a number of rules to put things into folders when they come in. Grant it, that’s a lot of folders, but subfolders help and my rules are pretty elaborate. (I had them setup anyway to ‘categorize’ mail, but now I made it move the mail too.)
I put the top 5 clients I have going on and a shortcut to the inbox (in case my rules don’t catch something) in my favorites. And I also have search folder for all received mail.

Then when email comes in, I’m forced to click on the folder it was moved to, to preview it. When I do that the window title changes to the folder name. Which is enough for my purposes. (1 folder per client)

Plus because I really don’t like folders for email, I just do it to get the name in the window title… the Search folder of all received mail is handy for just double checking the day, and making sure I addressed everything that came in. It’s essentially what my inbox used to look like. (But I can’t really work out of that, since I’d lose track of my time in there, it’s just in case I need it.)

Ok it’s only day 1, but I used this system all day successfully