Don’t Flag Emails! Do This Instead

Your mail app is the most distracting software on your Mac. Why? Because we are social beings who want to be useful to others and communicate with them. According to Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon and Dr. Michel Aubé, our emotions are predominantly caused by social interaction. When a message comes in from a friend, family member, colleague, or even an acquaintance, our brain generates a disposition to respond.

We need to learn to distance ourselves from these emotions. Run-of-the-mill productivity advice is to flag messages for future response. However, there are several drawbacks to relying on flags:

1. When you check your flagged emails, you’re entering the world’s most distracting environment: an email app! One can easily get distracted by random incoming emails. Moreover, seeing a bunch of flagged emails can lead you to answer more emails in a sitting than you ought to.
2. Flagged emails are not stored in a project folder, they lack context.
3. Flagging an email does not tell you what to do with the email or why it’s relevant.

So, flags do not solve the problem of distraction.

A better alternative

Often, a better alternative for dealing with actionable emails is to copy a link to the email and paste it into a task list. This could be your daily or weekly to-do list or a project folder. That way, you can navigate directly to the email when the time is right, without having to rummage through your flagged email list. The less time you spend in your mail app, the less likely you are to get distracted by email.

There’s no shortage of task managers for the Mac. In particular, I recommend:

• OmniFocus by The Omni Group.
• Things, and
• TaskPaper

which are three of many task management apps that are linkable.

How do you get a link to an email?

In the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, 23 Thought leaders and I have argued that all apps should provide a Copy Link function. The problem is that Apple Mail and most other email apps do not.

The solution is to use Hookmark. Hookmark enables you to copy links to emails, files, and almost anything else that is linkable.

This video explains how to use Hookmark to copy links to emails. It’s easy. First ensure you’ve installed Hookmark, the Basic tier of which is free and lets you copy and use links to emails. Then:

1. invoke the Hookmark popup window by pressing ⌃H (Control key and H) while an email is open or selected.
2. Press ⌘C

And presto! You’ve copied a link that you can paste anywhere. Here’s an example of Hookmark being invoked in the context of an email message:

Hookmark’s copy link command in context of an email message from my editor.

Hookmark’s email links are shareable

If you use Hookmark to copy links to emails in Apple Mail and some other apps, you’ll be able to share those links. Instead of forwarding a long message, for instance, you can simply send them a link to the email. That saves you and them time.

Two more tips for dealing with email:

1. If (goodness forbid) you need to write a long email, I recommend drafting it in a writing app, like TextEdit. That way, you will spend less time in your Mail app, decreasing your risk of distraction.
2. Use different email apps for different purposes. I contribute to three organizations. So I use Apple Mail for my main work (CogSci Apps and Simon Fraser University) and Mimestream for my Gmail accounts (my CogZest and personal email accounts). Mimestream separates email in two views: work and personal emails. That way, I am much less likely to be distracted by personal email when I’m working on organizational projects. And my organizational emails are each in their respective bins.

Find out more

You can find out more by

• watching this video
• reading this web page. or
• visiting this topic on the Hookmark productivity forum

Disclosure

I am the author of two Cognitive Productivity books: Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective, and Cognitive Productivity with macOS: 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge. I am also the inventor of Hookmark and mySleepButton and a director of CogSci Apps Corp., which markets those apps. I am also an adjunct professor of Education at Simon Fraser University. See about me.