Tag Archives: inbox-zero

Strategy to Inbox Zero

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Earlier in the week I had talked to a friend about my unmanageable email pile in my Inbox, about 78 pieces of email just sitting there, dwelling on the edge of my consciousness and weighing on me. Is there something there that I should take care of? Did I miss something important? So I started to chat and to do some research.

There are many strategies out there, and I adapted them for my own use, and so far it has worked out marvelously well. Here’s how I process my email:

  1. Create sorting folders. I created a host of new subfolders in my work email account which runs under a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. Because folders sort alphabetically, I forced the sort using number indexes and dashes.
    1. 1-Email Management
      1. 1-Today
      2. 2-This Week
      3. 3-This Quarter
      4. 4-FYI
      5. 5-Toodledo
      6. 6-Done/Sort
    2. 2-Help Desk
    3. 3-To Evernote
    4. 4-Barracuda
    5. 5-Syslog Alerts
    6. 6-ATP
  2. Then I sort the Inbox into the “Email Management” folder structure. If something has to be done today, it goes to 1-Today, and so on and so forth. My first consideration is the due-date for the item in my Inbox. If the item is purely informational, it goes into the 4-FYI box.
  3. I have rules set up in my email application, which happens to be Apple Mail. If I get email from Toodledo, my favorite To-Do system, they are moved into that folder. Anything from my Spiceworks Ticket sytem ends up in the 2-Help Desk folder. The messages from my Barracuda backup appliance end up in the 4-Barracuda folder, all my incoming Kiwi Syslog alerts end up in 5-Syslog Alerts, and finally the Advanced Threat Protection from Hosted Exchange reports get filed in 6-ATP. Rules are a huge part of keeping your neck above water when it comes to emails. There are a lot of purely informational emails that have zero urgency and very low importance, you want to keep them to go through them, but they don’t need to clog up your Inbox. Rules can help you sweep a lot of these away automatically. Always flag your junk mail, review that occaisonally to drag it for any false-positives.
  4. If an item is a request for help from work, and it didn’t come in as a ticket originally, those need to be pushed into the ticketing system. Thankfully Spiceworks allows you to forward emails into the ticket system by sending forwarded mail to whatever mailbox you’ve configured for the Spiceworks system. There are a litany of hashtag controls you can place in the email body to configure how tickets are arranged. My Cisco CUCM system is configured to also kick voicemails to me as attached MP3 emails, if they are requests for help, they likewise end up being forwarded with some extra flavor text to stomp down on confusion.
  5. If an item isn’t help, is urgent, is rather important, and has a clear date and time I will forward the email to my Toodledo using the configured email address on that system. Toodledo has a flag system that works on the Subject line. My preferred method is to alert people to events, include Toodledo as a BCC addressee, and then add at the end of the Subject line this text fragment: @work :1 day #{duedate} where the field duedate is whatever the date is that is relevant. Send it, forget it, it’s in the Toodledo list.
  6. The next step is to cycle through folders in Email Management, starting with Today and then reviewing all the rest. The Today folder is the action items that can be done today, or are due today. After completion, simple things are thrown away, but anything more elaborate or anything that touches on CYA gets sorted into the 3-To Evernote Folder.
  7. Evernote is a bottomless notekeeping system that I also use, and I leverage Evernote as a destination for all my CYA emails, and each quarter the extracted Sent Items from my Exchange account. I don’t trust Microsoft at all, I’d rather keep things in Evernote. Microsoft has a 50GB quota, Evernote does not have a quota. At the end of each week, I have a “Sharpen The Saw” task in Toodledo that I run, and a part of that is running along the structure in the 3-To Evernote folder, which includes all the emails across the branches of the company I work for, and all the vendors I have relationships with. Every Quarter, I search for all the emails for the previous block of time, soon Q1-2019 will be over so I search for all Q1-2019 emails and also move them into Evernote.
    1. The Evernote move is accomplished in two steps. The first step is to extract all the attachments out of the emails in my Exchange account, I use Mac Automator for that purpose, and here’s how it’s configured:
      1. Get Selected Mail Messages – Get selected messages.
      2. Get Attachments from Mail Messages – Save attachments in: “Attachments”
    2. I then run the Automator workflow, and all the attachments are put in a folder on my Desktop called Attachments. I then bulk rename them with their folder, a date such as 20190301 (YYYYMMDD), and then select them all and drag them into the right notebook in Evernote.
    3. Then I highlight all the relevant emails in my Mail App that I intend to send to Evernote, and I have created a General Service in my Mac called “Send To Evernote” which is actually another Automator Workflow, called “Send To Evernote.workflow”, that has this content:
      1. Run AppleScript: 
        1. on run {input, parameters}
 -- Slightly modified version of Efficient Computing's AppleScript: http://efficientcomputing.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/03/17/copy-email-message-in-mail-app-to-evernote-applescript/
 tell application "Mail"
  --get selected messages
  set theSelection to selection
  --loop through all selected messages
  repeat with theMessage in theSelection
   --get information from message
   set theMessageDate to the date received of theMessage
   set theMessageSender to sender of theMessage
   set theMessageSubject to the subject of the theMessage
   set theMessageContent to the content of theMessage
   set theMessageURL to "message://%3c" & theMessage's message id & "%3e"
   --make a short header
   set theHeader to the all headers of theMessage
   set theShortHeader to (paragraph 1 of theHeader & return & paragraph 2 of theHeader & return & paragraph 3 of theHeader & return & paragraph 4 of theHeader & return & return)
   --import message to Evernote
   tell application "Evernote"
    set theNewNote to (create note with text (theShortHeader & theMessageContent))
    set the title of theNewNote to theMessageSubject
    set the source URL of theNewNote to theMessageURL
    set the creation date of theNewNote to theMessageDate
   end tell
   -- move the email message to archive and make it bloody obvious
   set background color of theMessage to blue
   set acc to account of mailbox of theMessage
   move theMessage to mailbox "Archive" of acc
  end repeat
 end tell
 return input
end run

           

      2. It takes some time, but it efficiently moves the text parts of the emails selected into Evernote, using my default Notebook, called IN BOX.
      3. I select everything in the Evernote notebook IN BOX and move it to where it has to go, the destination notebook within Evernote itself. The messages all end up in the Archive folder, so then after that I hunt them down and delete them out of Exchange. Then empty the trash out of Exchange.
  8. In the end, I have a very slim Exchange account, a well fleshed out Evernote data store where I can search for all my email CYA details that I might need later on, and it also works on the web and over mobile apps as well. It’s very handy.
  9. It only took me a little while, maybe an hour tops to sort my Inbox and get to Inbox Zero. Then the cycling through the subfolders helped give me a handle on both urgency and importance, and I have a far better sense that I am actually on-top of my emails.

 

Inbox Zero

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Ever since my institution migrated to Web Mail Plus (I like to call it wimp for short) I’ve made it a workplace priority to never have anything stored on it that I can’t store someplace else. From the beginning, with our institutional migration to this new system I’ve been critical of it. I have no faith in either the dependability or privacy of the new system. The old system I did have a measure of faith in because my email was stored on my server in my machine room, not 10 feet from where I sit now. Now my professional email lives in Ann Arbor Michigan, in a place I have never seen and managed by people I have never met. There is a batch of paperwork that has been signed which should give me a sense of security, but again, it was one batch of strangers signing documents with another batch of strangers and a very nebulous promise that nothing upsetting would occur from this transition. As it is, I have developed a series of reflexes based on my zero-trust model that I use with strangers, especially institutional strangers. My livelihood is far too valuable to trust to the likes of my coworkers and peers. It’s nothing against them, but it’s a mix of wariness and “If you want it done right, do it yourself” mentality that so far has kept me happy and things working well in my life.

These reflexes regularly lead me to a state of geek nirvana, something called Inbox Zero. It’s a state where your inbox is totally clean, utterly empty. Nothing is malingering, loitering, and filling your mind with a fog of worry that if there are items there, you are somehow missing something or you haven’t completed something. Mostly it’s the sense that if there is something in there, I haven’t attended to it properly and that sits on my mind. It’s a kind of annoying background noise that lowers my happiness and sense of order, a fog of doubt. While this fog of doubt doesn’t really upset me or negatively impact my life, it contributes to my general sense of irritation and it’s one of those little passengers that contribute to stress breakdowns and spiraling vortexes of rage that I sometimes get trapped in. By eliminating this fog from my environment, it’s one less little niggling thing to wear me down.

My professional email gets only a few broad categories of information sent to it, that I have to attend to:

  • DBA Tasks – Highly structured task requests that usually include attached data. These almost always have a due date and a list of people to report to when the task is complete.
  • Help Desk/Office – More nebulous, mostly people asking for things or issuing trouble-tickets over email. In our office there is no single way to issue a trouble-ticket, people can walk up and verbally deliver one, they can email it in, leave voicemail, or try to ambush us as we walk through the office doing other tasks.
  • Organizational Chatter – Even more nebulous and needless are the myriad messages regarding the activities of the Trustees, Campus News, and little reminders sent out for events and/or meetings. I don’t claim they are worthless, but they are a kind of ‘hair that clogs the pipes’.
  • Vendor Spam – Generalized and unfocused bullshit from vendors we have or have had relationships with. Mostly this stuff is meaningless dreck related to things we will never need or find useful or even care about. These usually include anything sent from Dell, or HP, or the “Who’s Who” people.
  • Miscellaneous Bullshit – Very regularly I get meaningless messages from utter strangers with no content or worthless content. These are akin to email mosquitoes. They serve no real purpose, but there isn’t a reliable way to force them all into extinction. The best you can do is just swat them when they arrive.

So my strategies for handling these messages are as so:

  • If a message is worthy and important and has some sense of a due-date I forward it to my Toodledo account, which creates a task of the email with the body of the message as the meat of the task and the subject as the task title. This pushes the tasks that should originally go to toodledo in that direction. One of the side-effects of our transition was a massive retardation when it came to workflow. Our old system was great and nobody understood how to use it. The new system just doesn’t have the wits and the fact that nobody gets it is rendered meaningless from its absence.
  • If a message contains some hard nugget that I want to always retain I copy the relevant bits into an Evernote Note.
  • Everything else is bullshit. I have trained my Mac Mail.app using its Bayesian filters to separate utter bullshit from possible bullshit, so I just dump whatever mail puts in Junk right out and then toss the rest out after giving it a cursory glance.
  • If there is an item that isn’t task based, but does have a date – such as a meeting or some sort of event, I hover my mouse over the date parts and my Mail.app detects this and offers me a choice to create a new iCal Calendar Entry for that event. Talk about handy.

At the end of the day at best, or the end of the week at worst I should always be able to return to Inbox Zero. There is no reason to store items in the wimp, everything else can be sorted either into Evernote or Toodledo or the files taken out and placed in Dropbox with appropriate Finder comments attached. That all being said, I do store some things in my wimp account, mostly things that I probably should keep for documentations sake, especially if a coworker is going to wear their ass for a hat sometime in the future, it’s good to be at least a little prepared for those sorts of things. I principally store promises and protestations that something won’t ever happen again in my wimp account, and when they screw up, at least it’s handy there. Wimp glories in a 10GB quota. I use only a human-hairs worth of that quota and I have no desire to ever really make use of wimp beyond that. It’s a necessary evil, a funnel, not a bucket. I’m sure organizationally that bucks the conventions, as they wish it to be both a funnel and a bucket, but I have more faith in other buckets than what is in wimp itself.