Blog
By Roger G. Best
I haven’t said much thus far about creating filters (aka, rules) and scripts to automate some of your email handling… there’s a reason. First, these rules can be helpful in some cases. I have certain messages that come to me every day. I know these messages are going to come into my inbox and I also know that they are not critical (in other words, they will not require my immediate/near immediate attention). I have created rules to move those items into special folders. I, personally, have about 8 such folders to contain the various messages until I’m ready to address them. The rules look at messages as they come into my mailbox and make a decision about what to do with them and then perform the prescribed action. These rules remove something in the ballpark of 300 messages every day (I know, that’s obscene) from the primary location (my Inbox) that uses the most of my brain power to process. I look at these other folders and deal with those messages a couple of times every day. In this context, I can process this 300’ish messages in a matter of minutes because I’m focused on the specific content and I can take the appropriate action with far less distractions. If the same messages were going directly into my inbox and I had to switch my mind from one topic to the next that frequently, it would take far more time. This, although it is intentionally vague, is a good example of where rules can be a BIG benefit.
The trouble comes when you’re filtering so much stuff (especially via “sender” and “subject” filters) that you end up scattering useful and timely updates into about a billion different places out of view. If I’ve set up dozens of filters to automatically move messages from a specific client, or about a specific subject, into a folder, I’ve created a system by which I have to look through all these different folders to find/deal with the messages that have arrived. This can be one of those extremely rare beasts where you’ve actually automated too much.
There has to be a middle ground somewhere. Instead, focus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with in a single pass and/or later. Depending on what you consider noise, this could probably include:
- blog and LiveJournal comments
- “friend” requests and similar announcements from community sites like My Space or Flickr
- mailing lists and subscribed forum threads
- regular updates like newsletters and office memos
- non-spam store updates, coupons, and sale announcements
- I think you’re starting to get my drift
Remember, our ultimate goal here is for you to spend less time playing with your email and more time doing what we need to do. The idea of a rule is not to hide information that you really need, but to ensure that you aren’t being interrupted constantly for what amounts to low-level noise. Choose what you can stand to deal with later on and make regular reading and culling of these filtered items a scheduled task — maybe twice or three times a day (or possibly even a few times a week) go through all your collected bulk and catch up on what you “missed.”
Good rule of thumb: When you check your email and find yourself groaning “Ugh, this again?” consider creating a filter. By the same token, if you notice you’re missing stuff to over-filtering, dial it down until you get the mix right. These rules are ultimately best at shunting away the really un-important stuff — you are the only one who’s got the qualifications to decide what happens to important items. That’s why you get the big bucks.
Finally, keep in mind that, like digital security and sustainable human love, smart email filtering is a process, and not a one-time event. Learn, tweak, watch, and improve to keep your priceless attention trained where it can do the most good. (Hint: that’s probably not monitoring realtime updates on your current count of LiveJournal friends.)
Thanks,
Roger