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Productivity Series: How I Handle Email

Saturday September 25, 2021. 05:00 PM , from MacMost
A big problem for a lot of people is dealing with email. Here are my techniques for keeping your inbox empty and how I file away old messages. This is the first in a new series where I share some of my own productivity methods.



Check out Productivity Series: How I Handle Email at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how I handle email.
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So this is a first in a series of videos I'm going to do on productivity. More specifically on things I do to increase my productivity by using Macs. So these are techniques that I personally use. They may or may not fit your needs and style of using computers. But I hope there are some ideas that you can use.
So in this episode I want to talk about email. This is, of course, my demo account. Not my real account. But I'm going to use it to demonstrate how I handle email. A lot of people struggle handling email. I get a ton of email just like everybody else. Probably more so. But email really isn't a problem for me because I gave myself some rules many years ago and I follow them.
The first rule is that my Inbox should be empty at all times. Of course new email comes into the Inbox but when I go to check my email I make it my goal to clear out my Inbox. I know a lot of people don't use their Inbox in this way. Some people have their Inbox filled with things going back days, months, years. Everything just stays in the Inbox. I take the Inbox literally. It's email that just came into me. Now what I've got to do is take an action with each message in the Inbox and get it out of the Inbox as quickly as possible. My Inbox should be empty when I'm done checking my email. So the default state is that there are no messages in it. I like to call this Inbox Zero. But other people use that same term to mean other things.
Another thing that I don't do is I don't care about Read or Unread. Some people use the Unread status of an email to show that they need to do something with it. Then when they do something with it it's just Read and it stays in their Inbox. I don't care about Read or Unread. If it's in the Inbox that means it's something I need to deal with as soon as I can. Every email that's in the Inbox, when I go to check, I look at it and I take an action. The simplest action is to read the email. Sometimes that's all I need to do. Sometimes I need to respond. So that would be the action for that email. Sometimes I need to do other things like maybe set an event on my calendar. Maybe it's an email about an upcoming appointment. Maybe I need to create a reminder because it's something I need to take an action on but I can't do it right now. So I would set a reminder for some point in the future and then I'm done with that email.
Whatever the email message is there's always an action that you need to take. Then you can get it out of your Inbox. You could always take that action immediately even if it's something in the future you can add a calendar event, a reminder, or something else and then get the email out.
Then what do I do with the email messages. Well, they all go into the Archive folder. As a matter of fact I use the keyboard shortcut, Message and Archive, Control Command A. It goes into Archive. Notice what I've got here. I don't have any extra folders. I haven't created any folder for work or home, for personal, for family, for trips, for tickets, for anything. I don't have any organization in here at all. That wasn't always true. Many years ago I had a lot of folders there and every email message I got I had to figure out where it went. Sometimes it was confusing. Sometimes a message would belong in more than one folder. Sometimes it wouldn't belong in any and I had to think about whether I needed to create a new folder to hold this type of email or maybe put it in a miscellaneous folder or something like that. This always takes up a little bit of time for every single email message you get all day long. But if you put it in the Archive folder it takes no time at all. You don't have to think about it. The message is there for you to find later. So idea is to shift the effort from now when you're finished reading the email to later when you need find the email later and you just do a search on your Archive.
The reality is that most of the time you never need to see an email again. It's only occasionally that you need to find an old email. Every single time when I need to find an old email a search does the trick. You can search for things in the Subject, in the Body, who it's from. All this stuff. Even by Date and figure out where the email is. It usually doesn't take me more than a few seconds to find an email that I need. The other thing I don't do is I don't put any email in the Trash. Now maybe if I was a normal person I would put things like obvious spam and scam emails in the trash. But since I kind of keep those around in case I need to do a video on a scam or something I just put everything into the Archive folder. This also saves me from having to decide whether something gets thrown away or archived. A long time ago I would occasionally throw things away. You know what, every once in awhile I'd realize I needed something that I threw away. Today email providers give you a ton of storage space. So even with all the email I get I've never come close to running out of storage.
So that's it. That's how I deal with email. The rules are that every time I check my email my goal is to empty my Inbox completely. To remove an email from my Inbox I read it and take an action. Then everything goes into the Archive folder where if I do need it later I can search for it. If I don't it's really not going to get in my way. That's how I have an empty Inbox all the time and email for me is never stressful. Related Subjects: Productivity (31 videos)
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