This has been a quiet week at work: no big projects, few meetings, several coworkers gone. In fact, I'm working from home today because UPS needs my signature for some damned thing I ordered. But that's another story. This week I've had a chance to really catch my breath, catch up in things, and finally close in on having empty inboxes for both my personal and work e-mail. To do this, I needed three things:
- Time. It took the better part of a few days to plow through what I had and figure out how what might actually work.
- Search. Between the search capabilities built into Thunderbird and Google Desktop Search, I've decided to abandon my religious filing of email into a custom crafted hierarchy of mail folders. It simply takes too much time and I realized that I just don't need to refer to things that way very often. I still have a lot of mail filtered into project specific folders automatically, but anything that ends up in my Inbox will simply get moved to a folder called archive as soon as I've dealt with it. My Inbox is now reserved for two things: (a) items I've not yet seen and which aren't covered by one of my filters, and (b) items I need to act on.
- Filters. I've created a few filters in Thunderbird that help a lot. They're pictured at the right. They help to find, prioritize, and organize my mail. The "14+ Days Old" filter was most useful in getting things under control. I'd select all those messages, mark them as read, and move them to archive. I still have them available if I need to find 'em later, but they no longer clutter my mind. As of this moment, there are 6 items in my Yahoo! Inbox and 8 in my personal Inbox. I'm going to try this Yahoo! Search blog as well. Visit Jeremy's blog:
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