stevengharms.com

I’m very happy to report that I have put my inboxes ( Personal1, Personal2, GMail, etc. to 0 messages). I believe that an empty inbox is a key to sanity, especially for those who live and die by the e-mail sword.

For anything that comes in any inbox I either:

• Reply / take an action
• Delete it
• Archive it for reference

With just these simple three techniques and a few extra folders on my hard disk, I was able to empty all the existing mail in my inbox.

Now, I will certainly get more mail in the future, so how am I going to handle it? I will apply those three simple rules above.

I have added one more technology to help with a certain class of mail that I call “Moderate interest, low involvement” (MILI)¹ mail. MILI mail examples are, updates from facebook, reminders from my credit card companies, notifications from the service department for my car, etc.

Traditionally, being a bit of mail guru, I have handled this by using filters, Procmail, senmail, perl, etc. Instead of managing the filtration ruleset, I’ve now “offloaded” that work to OtherInbox. It’s a utility whose handiness scales, at the very least, linearly the more addresses you have.

Here’s a video explanation of Otherinbox.

With my MILI mail gone, all I have to do is handle the thin remainder with my three techniques ( adapted from David Allen’s GTD methodolgy).

If you follow @otherinbox on Twitter, you may get a beta invite. Alternatively, mail me at otherinboxinvite@sgharms.otherinbox.com for the next 30 days and I’ll try to siphon your name to the beta board and get you an invite.

Footnotes

¹ No, there is no VANILLI mail.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under Technology and Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.