5 tips to deal with multiple mailboxes and stay on top of your emails
I strongly believe that there is no universal GTD system, that works out of the box. There is no silver bullet here that helps everybody guaranteed. I personally run through several methods and tools to keep on top of my emails and tasks. Unfortunately, none of them worked well for me in a long run. However, I think that studying these systems and testing the tools allows you to come up with something unique that would work for you. So today I would like to share my experience dealing with multiple mailboxes and my tricks to keep on top of the emails. I encourage you not to think about my methods as “yet-another-zero-inbox-technique” but to find an inspiration in it and might to make use of some of it. So let’s roll.
1. Collect all emails in one account
I have multiple active email accounts: work, personal, previous work, previous aliases, email for registrations on shady sites, and so on and so forth. It’d be a headache to login in all of them separately. However, I saw people having 10+ account in gmail and constantly switching between them. Gosh! Why? Why do you do that? Set up forwarding from secondary emails (For Gmail — https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/fwdandpop) and it alone would save you a ton of time:
I personally, use quite an outdated software. I’m a thunderbird fan. Yeah, I know, “boooo!”, the year is 2017, the rest of the world go with web-clients or something with way more contemporary design, like AirMail or PolyMail. But the thing is, it works for me, it has few neat features I’m using I wasn’t able to find anywhere else. Once again, I’m not encouraging you to switch to my mail client, I’m just telling you what practices I’m using and found to be a solid working solution.
I have almost all of my email accounts added in thunderbird app. Here is how it looks like:
2. Keep folders and filters on the server
As you see, I have a lot of folders and subfolders. It’s a good practice to sort out your emails in advance. Thus you can pay attention to important maillists or group of people on a first place. Mini-bonus: you can “Mark as read” the whole folder in one click. Make sure it’s not an important folder, though.
Important rule here is quite simple: filters, labeling, and folder sorting should be applied on the server (For Gmail — https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filters):
Thus, if you’re changing an email client at some point, you won’t have to set up all filters once again.
3. Utilize the most powerful feature — Star!
I work with my emails from different devices: work laptop, personal laptop, my phone, ipad, sometimes through web-client. I’m pretty sure it’s possible to achieve the same user experience regardless which device you’re using, but I haven’t mastered this technique yet. Therefore I have one “main” device, which is my working PC, all the rest are for immediate response or awareness. I think everybody already heard of 2 minutes rule. It applies here as well: if you can answer this email in less than 2 minutes, do it now; don’t leave it for later. In an event, when I need to do some research prior answering or come up with a relatively detailed response, I’d mark with a star this email to get back to it. Usually, from my work laptop.
4. Store starred emails in one place
Ok, now you might end up in a situation when you have a lot of starred emails in different mailboxes or different folders. It’s not handy to cycle through folders to find them. Let’s get it together in one spot. In thunderbird, I’m using “Saved Search” feature (File->New->Saved Search…):
After that we just need to specify folders that might have starred emails:
And voilà! You have all your important emails from different folders and accounts in one spot. Very handy!
5. Apply additional layer: color codes.
Let’s move on. I also like to tag my emails wit color codes. This feature I found in thunderbird ages ago and I wasn’t able to find handy analog anywhere else since. Probably, it’s the main reason I’m still sticking to thunderbird app. You can press a key number (1,2,3, etc) to color code an email. For example:
1 (Red) — Important, address ASAP
2 (Yellow) — Important (work), but dependent on something else.
3 (Green) — Personnel
4 (Blue) — ….
….
I can click the Tags button anytime and thunderbird selects only highlighted emails, so I instantly see, what should be addressed in a first place:
Conclusions:
- There is no universal scheme fits everyone. Invest some in testing and experimenting to find the best way
- There is always one email account favoring the rest. Use it as the main point of entry, and forward emails from the rest of the accounts to the main one.
- Apply filters, labels, and sortings on a server, so mail client collects your emails already sorted. If you change a client, you won’t have to set it up again.
- Apply 2 minutes rule. If you can answer your email fast, do it now.
- Mark with a star emails you need to address later on.
- Create a “Saved Search”, so you keep all important (Starred) emails in one spot.
- Apply color codes to different types of important emails.
Thank you for reading. And of course, I would appreciate if you share your tips and feedback in the comments.
