stuck on the email
I have read blog after blog after blog about email organization this week, really throughout the whole of the summer. As my total count of mail messages has comfortably cleared five digits, containing and segmenting that amount of information becomes necessary.
One of the great disasters I had this summer as an Apple campus rep was trying to make sense of one professor’s inbox. All email was kept in his inbox - it was received, read, and just left there. All 100,000 messages in his inbox. It was shocking. The worst part about it is that he signs himself up to a myriad of useless daily email spotlights or newsletters which sit along beside the requests for help from his Ph.D. students. I think the plethora of email articles/blog entries combined with this worst case scenario gave me the motivation to rethink email on my Mac.
Then, I discovered Apple Mail’s ability to incorporate Rules. An email is received sent to a specific VT listserv that I subscribe to and is launched away from my various inboxes and into a folder where I spot it has something to do with Mechanical Engineering, for instance. A Rule for family emails, for cycling emails, and so on. Rules have really changed the way I organize my mail. My inbox situation is still a mess - certainly no Inbox Zero immediate hopes for me - but I now understand the importance of cataloguing and archiving my messages.
At this moment, I have about 5,000 mail messages sitting in my general inbox. It could take years to sort them through, were it not for Rules; but even with that help, I am simply used to using my inbox as an archiving folder itself, so much so that it is hard for me to actually move the mail from one folder to another (albeit, one is officially archived while the other is an inbox).
I have a quagmire of email. But at least I know what I have on my hands. I suppose, with a weekend-worth of time, I could go through all personal email and move it around, too. My efforts, at the moment, have brought a few rays of email clarity, but a likely scenario suggests that I have much to learn and much to press through.
And if push comes to shove, I always have Spotlight - the all-mighty computer tool. I’ve actually gotten lazy enough that sometimes I Spotlight Safari to save myself clicking on it in the Dock. This is just a geek blog. What a waste.