Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing
Merlin Mann | Nov 17 2006
Lots of the kids are excited about the arrival of MsgFiler, which is a neat litte app for helping you file away your messages in Mail.app:
Zesty. But I'll just play devil's advocate on this one: if you find yourself inordinately excited about the arrival of this (admittedly clever) application, there's an excellent chance that your email archiving system is unnecessarily complex and, in fact, is in need of a major streamlining. Discuss. Me? Here's my own folder hierarchy (and the Mail Act-on key I use to send selected messages there.):
That's it. Personally, I abandoned the byzantine filing system quite a while ago, and so far -- given a mindful combination of Smart Folders and Spotlight -- I've yet to find a compelling case for manually filing beyond a depth of more than one folder. So, my larger question for you guys with more than, say, five or so archive sub-folders: How often are you using your archiving hierarchy to retrieve old mail? In other words, give me your success stories and best practices by which the time spent on meticulous manual filing has paid outsize rewards in finding stuff later. Or, perhaps better put: what are the limitations of Smart Folders, and what would need to change about them to get you out of the manual filing routine? Because, I gotta tell you, it kinda seems like a lot of busy work given what seems like modest functional pay-off. But you school me... 66 Comments
POSTED IN:
 I don't currently have much...Submitted by El (not verified) on November 17, 2006 - 7:49am.
I don't currently have much e-mail, but at a previous job copyediting and laying out articles for technical journals, I always had folders for each journal issue and subfolders for each article. E-mail would come in from all sorts of sources (multiple authors, editors, fellow production people) in all sorts of formats, beginning up to six months ahead of publication, and so had to be manually filed. A few weeks after the issue was done (to allow for stragglers), the folders would be archived. I often referred to e-mails in the folders. The system worked beautifully; it seems to me to be the kind of context for which the above app would be useful. » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
