Give Mail.app a complete productivity workout
Derek Jones has written a long and most excellent post 
on how to whip your Mail.app into shape as a lean, mean machine for getting jobs done with efficiency and speed.
His Mail.app was failing the pinch test. One day he suddenly noticed that he had 9,000 emails in his inbox and he didn’t really know why.
He did know how he wanted it to be though:
I desperately needed to finally write some Rules, use some Smart Mailboxes, or something. I wanted my inbox to be empty when I had read and either filed or deleted the Offending Intrusion. I wanted to assign importance or tag an email in some way that would help me organize where I spent my attention instead of feeling like I needed to act immediately on an email as soon as I read it. While I’m at it, why not finally switch to IMAP so I can sync my email between my G5 and Macbook? Every other aspect of my computing is built around synchronicity, why is my email left out?
He walks readers through his new fitness regime: how to archive old emails in an organised way, how to switch to IMAP so that all your email is available and synchronised between multiple Macs, and how to develop a “tag-and-go” system for email using Mail Act-on and MailTags (why not can compare his system to the way I do it, then work from them both to make a system that matches your needs?).
I love posts like this because they offer the opportunity to measure your own system against something more objective, a system that works for someone else. You always learn something new. It’s long, but it’s worth it, and it will put some muscle into your Mail.app.
[Thanks, Leslie]
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, getting things done, gtd, inbox zero, mail.app, plugins, ProductivityRelated posts