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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
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 Reply to BZ: I have no...Submitted by Dan (not verified) on November 22, 2006 - 7:55am.
Reply to BZ: I have no problems with the first GTD cut -- handling the less-than-2-minute stuff right NOW. However (and this, I suspect, is strictly personal preference), I don't like the approach of identifying the more complicated stuff, putting it aside, reading it again, and then dealing with it. When processing my inbox, I like to deal with all of it just once, so that I don't have to re-read messages several times. Please note that my definition of "deal with it" doesn't necessarily mean complete the task now; it could simply mean putting the email on the calendar for action at a later date. Of course, I don't get 200 emails per day. Perhaps if I were at that level of inundation, I'd need a different approach.... » POSTED IN:
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