From the school of “you are your dog / handbag / desk / pantry” and so on, comes an article in the Wall Street Journal (for subscribers only, but reprinted in the Northwest Florida Daily News).

Titled “You are your inbox”, it claims that the makeup of your inbox reveals important insights about your inner life and character:

“If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways,” says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. “Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?”

On the other hand, if you obsessively clean your inbox every 10 minutes, you may be so quick to move on that you miss opportunities and ignore nuances. Or your compulsion for order may be sapping your energy from other endeavors, such as your family.

You then get a highly unethical but effective tip from Scott Stratten, some advice on being ruthless from Merlin Mann and a warning from Nancy Flynn (executive director of the ePolicy Institute and generous Hawk Wings supporter):

When you’re quick to respond with offers of help, “people use email to turn their crisis into your emergency,” she says.

Your inbox is an important source of self-knowledge, according to one expert:

Because “inboxes are metaphors for our lives,” Dr. Greenfield says, there’s no cure-all solution to inbox management. We’re all too different. But he believes an awareness of our inbox behavior can help us better understand other areas of our lives.

Related posts

• Inbox Zero: Slash and Burn at 43 Folders
• Work smarter, work faster
• Two tips to manage your email better
• Three outgoing mail fixes for Mac users on the go
• Ten Commandments of Email according to Intel

Merlin Mann has posted a series of iCal tips that will breath new life into your use of Groups and Notes.

He uses Groups to organise his calendars into contexts or “areas of responsiblity”.

The Notes field gets a good working over too. “I use the crap out of iCal’s various extra fields”, he says. You could too.

Merlin also offers some miscellaneous tips, including the use of “dashes”, marking small tasks so that they can be found with a quick search. Clever.

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• What your inbox says about you
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• Scripts to automate the Mail.app Envelope speed trick
• Schedule delayed to dos in iCal
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Merlin Mann is running a series on emptying your inbox (easy) and keeping it that way (harder).

His articles — “Inbox Zero” he’s calling them — cover all sorts of tips and tricks from just nuking your inbox to the smart use of filters and the liberating joy of hammering the delete button. He also talks about the importance of scheduling visits to your inbox so that you stay in control of your inbox and not vice-versa.

Speaking of Yojimbo, he also presents a series of past posts entitled, “Becoming an Email Ninja” .

As I read it, the overall message is, “For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.”

It is interesting to compare this advice with the strategies of other people — like Keith Robinson’s suggestions on Lifehacker (Getting to Done ) and Guy Kawasaki’s tips (12 Tips for Better Emailing ).

Related posts

• What your inbox says about you
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• How the delete key is your best friend
• Finally, a nice icon for Gmail
• Zimbra launches Desktop client

Merlin Mann is the guy who does 43 Folders .

He uses a 17″ PowerBook that’s greatly in need of an upgrade.

HW: How long have you been using Mail.app? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

MM: I’ve used Mail.app since the first non-beta of OS X I installed, although for a long time we “saw other people.” For the longest time I had this really Byzantine, IMAP-enabled system of using Mail.app for any kind of serious email work and Entourage for all other PIM-based work. I felt like one of those guys on the Ed Sullivan Show, dashing around, trying to keep all the plates spinning.

Since moving to kGTD and iCal a few weeks ago, I’m 100% off Entourage, but do use Gmail, and occasionally my provider’s web app if I’m away from home base.

I loved Eudora back in the day — it’s what I used for like 5 years starting in ‘95 — but it started to feel crufty and a bit out of date. Took me months to get used to not having all my mailboxes in separate windows — an old-school Mac practice that’s since been replaced by the ubiquitous 3-panel interface.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

(more…)

Related posts

• Talking Mail.app: Ethan Schoonover
• Talking Mail.app: Scott Morrison
• Talking Mail.app: Rui Carmo
• Talking Mail.app: Rob Griffiths
• Talking Mail.app: Pierre Igot