Organising emails as a developer

Managing the chaos

Being a software engineer we get a lot’s of emails everyday, We have subscribed to weekly newsletter, we get notification emails from github, we get emails from our project management tools, and of-course direct emails. Getting a lot of emails can cause us to miss something important that is for us.

I use inbox by gmail to manage my emails so the points i will be mentioning will be related with inbox by gmail.

Use Labels

Email Inbox without labels is a nightmare. You get lot’s of email so label is a perfect way to manage them. Create a label for your github emails, another for newsletters. This will help you manage the priorities.

Unsubscribe

There are a lot of subscription emails that we receive. We should periodically unsubscribe from all those unwanted subscription. Some time when we unsubscribe we still receive emails from them. That is really bad, we get email we don’t want. For that labels come to rescue. Simply create a label named unsubscribed and make to skip inbox. So you will not get bothered by the emails you don’t want.

Check emails frequently

Some emails are urgent and some are not so check for any new emails frequently, i check it at a gap of 15min on average. This does not mean you have to reply immediately. Some emails are not quiet important and can wait, but we have already checked the email and we might forget to acknowledge them later. Thanks to inbox we can snooze the emails for later. So we get a snoozed emails after some time that we specified.

Read only the important

While checking emails frequently you don’t need to look at everything. Since we have labels now, we can know what label is more important and we can read only them.

Fix your time to read your github/project management tools email

First determine how frequently you need to check the emails for these tools. According to that make your mind and open inbox at a fixed time, so that you can respond to those emails. Go to github, reply any PR/issues you are mentioned or review any pull request. That way you can organise your time and be more productive.

Get to zero inbox everyday

Don’t keep a single unread message in your inbox. That included your labels as well. If you think it is unimportant just mark it as read or delete them all.

Use multiple accounts

The last thing is using multiple account. Have at least two separate account for you personnel email and professional email. You can also have a separate account for your personal emails for friends and family and a separate one for emails that you use for signing up accounts in different website or for newsletter you subscribe. This can also be managed by labels but it is better to use separate account.

This help you organise yourself. Know your priority and manage yourself. With this you will not be bugged by unimportant message at important time. Your valuable time will go to emails that is important. And can check the other less important at the time you are taking a break.