Jon's Tech Talk

Iv’e been using Gmail since it first went ‘public’ in April 2005. I still would prefer to have folders over labels for my email, but otherwise Gmail is a near perfect email solution. Almost two years ago, I started taking an ‘Inbox Zero’ approach to how I handle my email (which I will discuss in another post). For those not familiar with Inbox Zero, its just a way to manage your email where your inbox is triage – you process your inbox to empty it, categorizing any emails that actually require action.

I’m in the process of launching a new website. While im using a separate email account for the website, its just a forwarder to my personal gmail account (since I’m the only one working on this site for now).  All of these emails will be generated through the website (either for advertising, contact, or signups), so they were easy to create tags for each type, and filter accordingly. I also subscribe to 4 mailing lists, as well as a few folders for various side projects, notes, etc.

But thats when I realized, even though im tagging all of this email, my tags are still hard to navigate! How is that supposed to help!?!?

After looking around online, searching google, and even reading a blog post by one of the people i follow on Twitter, I got quite a bit of inspiration on how to organize mine to not only make me more efficient, but also help me keep with an Inbox Zero workflow, automatically!

The approach I came up with started with renaming some of my labels, and adding a few new ones:

• For messages that are from a mailing list, no matter what their content, they start with ‘list-’.
• For my new website (or any other project I am working on that needs more than one folder/label for all of its messages), I used an acronym I was familiar with. For example  ’adc-’.
• I then have my ‘sub’ tags, for example ‘adc-twitter’, ‘adc-general’, ‘adc-contact’.
• For tags that I would reference most often, I started their name with a ‘*’.  Like ‘*sidework’, ‘*webstuff’. You could also do something very similar and attach a filter or search to as well. For example – everything my wife sends me can be tagged ‘*fromwife’.
• Finally, I have a few other labels I use for general client stuff, or auto messages like Twitter direct messages.

After using this naming convention, I then use label colors to help group them by topic as well. For example, while my new website all is tagged ‘xyz-something’, I do subscribe to a list just for that topic. In that case, that list and this website are all tagged green. For another group of my lists dedicated to Mac development, they are each tagged orange. This allows me to easily see if I need to read something on a particular list or group of labels sooner than others. Also, because of how the names of mine line up, the colors group together nicely as well.

Finally, I use filters to tag and process email as soon as it comes in. I created filters with rather simple settings, usually just checking subject names and who the email came from. These filters are all set to just tag the email appropriately, and archive immediately (skipping the inbox). Therefore I don’t have a bunch of random mailing list messages clogging my inbox, and then devote attention to specific topics when I get the time.

With this combo of tags, colors, and filters, I have much less (if any) mail going directly to my inbox. As I start to notice new trends, I create new filters and tags if this mail needs to be handled automatically. This new method has saved me quite a bit of time already, and also makes me much less frustrated when working with so many types of mail.