Taking Control of your Inbox
I had the chance to change the way I manage my emails with my latest venture (Comrz). The truth is that it was quite frustrating at my previous venture (Emojo) in that every morning I had 300 fresh emails in, and would get a further one or two hundred messages each day. Clearly taking any time off made for many days of catchup when I returned.
The great news is that the tools available today mean that I now rarely spend more than ten minutes in the morning filtering out all the non-urgent, non-essential stuff and am able to deal instantly with all the urgent issues without any clutter.
There are three key tools that I use to make this happen:
The first thing I did was not transfer most of my email subscriptions over to my new account. In fact I cancelled 90% of them. What I did instead was either subscribe to the same people / organisations through Google Reader and Twitter where possible, and in some instances where this was not an option I simply dropped out.
Having all the news feeds come in through Twitter and Google Reader means that I catch most of the info at the same speed, but stuff that I miss or gets dated doesn't clutter up my inbox. If my Google Reader has too much of a backlog I simply mark everything as read, same with TweetDeck.
It is noticeable that I don't use as many news sources as previously on the the same subjects, but I have broadened my subscriptions to include a broader range of news stories. It's fair to say that I consume 99% of my news through Twitter and Google Reader.
It's taken a fair bit of tweeking and effort to adjust to Gmail for my corporate email. Given that I've been using Outlook for the previous decade. It's clear that once you get used to them that Tags are the way to go. Superb. Being able to tag an invoice with Finance and Accounts Payable at the same time is very useful. I then simply un-tick the Accounts Payable option when the payment has been made.
Running a small company means that I need to keep a close eye on things. It means I have Five inboxes and around thirty tags that I use. It's a great feature in Gmail that it can present five inboxes on the same screen.
My Inboxes are:
- Inbox - i.e. fresh stuff as well as urgent stuff
- Starred - important (but not urgent)
- Active Opportunities - the latest correspondence on all the deals we're working on
- Accounts Payable - moneys to pay
- Accounts Receivable - moneys coming in
To make everything more streamlined I have set up lots of rules for automatically tagging incoming emails, e.g. support forum posts are all tagged with Support; any correspondence with financial people is always tagged Finance. It means I simply archive my emails after I've read them, since they're already automatically tagged.
The fact that Gmail, TweetDeck and Google Reader work everywhere, and on all devices, means that it's always possible to stay on top with minimal effort.
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