Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how I handle email.
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So this is a first in a series of videos I'm going to do on productivity.
More specifically on things I do to increase my productivity by using Macs.
So these are techniques that I personally use. They may or may not
fit your needs and style of using computers. But I hope there are some ideas that you can use.
So in this episode I want to talk about email. This is, of course, my demo account. Not my real
account. But I'm going to use it to demonstrate how I handle email. A lot of people struggle
handling email. I get a ton of email just like everybody else. Probably more so. But email really
isn't a problem for me because I gave myself some rules many years ago and I follow them.
The first rule is that my Inbox should be empty at all times. Of course new email comes into the
Inbox but when I go to check my email I make it my goal to clear out my Inbox. I know a
lot of people don't use their Inbox in this way. Some people have their Inbox filled with things
going back days, months, years. Everything just stays in the Inbox. I take the Inbox literally.
It's email that just came into me. Now what I've got to do is take an action with each
message in the Inbox and get it out of the Inbox as quickly as possible. My Inbox should
be empty when I'm done checking my email. So the default state is that there are no messages in it.
I like to call this Inbox Zero. But other people use that same term to mean other things.
Another thing that I don't do is I don't care about Read or Unread. Some people use the Unread
status of an email to show that they need to do something with it. Then when they do something
with it it's just Read and it stays in their Inbox. I don't care about Read or Unread. If
it's in the Inbox that means it's something I need to deal with as soon as I can. Every email
that's in the Inbox, when I go to check, I look at it and I take an action. The simplest action
is to read the email. Sometimes that's all I need to do. Sometimes I need to respond. So that would
be the action for that email. Sometimes I need to do other things like maybe set an
event on my calendar. Maybe it's an email about an upcoming appointment. Maybe I need to create
a reminder because it's something I need to take an action on but I can't do it right now.
So I would set a reminder for some point in the future and then I'm done with that email.
Whatever the email message is there's always an action that you need to take. Then you can get
it out of your Inbox. You could always take that action immediately even if it's something in the
future you can add a calendar event, a reminder, or something else and then get the email out.
Then what do I do with the email messages. Well, they all go into the Archive folder. As a matter
of fact I use the keyboard shortcut, Message and Archive, Control Command A. It goes into Archive.
Notice what I've got here. I don't have any extra folders. I haven't created any folder for work
or home, for personal, for family, for trips, for tickets, for anything. I don't have any
organization in here at all. That wasn't always true. Many years ago I had a lot of folders there
and every email message I got I had to figure out where it went. Sometimes it was confusing.
Sometimes a message would belong in more than one folder. Sometimes it wouldn't belong in any and I
had to think about whether I needed to create a new folder to hold this type of email or maybe
put it in a miscellaneous folder or something like that. This always takes up a little bit
of time for every single email message you get all day long. But if you put it in the
Archive folder it takes no time at all. You don't have to think about it. The message is
there for you to find later. So idea is to shift the effort from now when you're finished reading
the email to later when you need find the email later and you just do a search on your Archive.
The reality is that most of the time you never need to see an email again.
It's only occasionally that you need to find an old email. Every single time when I need to find
an old email a search does the trick. You can search for things in the Subject, in the Body,
who it's from. All this stuff. Even by Date and figure out where the email is. It usually doesn't
take me more than a few seconds to find an email that I need. The other thing I don't do is I don't
put any email in the Trash. Now maybe if I was a normal person I would put things like obvious spam
and scam emails in the trash. But since I kind of keep those around in case I need to do
a video on a scam or something I just put everything into the Archive folder. This also
saves me from having to decide whether something gets thrown away or archived. A long time ago I
would occasionally throw things away. You know what, every once in awhile I'd realize I needed
something that I threw away. Today email providers give you a ton of storage space.
So even with all the email I get I've never come close to running out of storage.
So that's it. That's how I deal with email. The rules are that
every time I check my email my goal is to empty my Inbox completely. To remove an email from my
Inbox I read it and take an action. Then everything goes into the Archive folder
where if I do need it later I can search for it. If I don't it's really not going to get in
my way. That's how I have an empty Inbox all the time and email for me is never stressful.